Posted by randfish

Historically, I’ve been fairly narrow in what I read in the blogosphere and tech arena (almost all SEO-centric stuff). You can see my Firefox sidebar list here, which  hasn’t changed much since 2008 with the exception of the blogs and news sections. But, over the past 6 months, I’ve been broadening out considerably and found that it adds a great deal to the conversations I’m able to participate in and contribute to, especially as SEOmoz itself has expanded from the SEO world to the larger technology and startup world. For the New Year, I thought I’d share some of the sources that have contributed most on this front and some of my favorite posts/contributions from those sources.

#1 – Hacker News

(http://news.ycombinator.com)

I find more good stuff here than anywhere else, and the diversity is impressive, too. Tragically, Hacker News is also a place for lots of misinformation, fear, and loathing around SEO, but it’s good to get a sense for how the rest of the technology world still views our niche. The signal to noise ratio is higher than on places like delicious/popular, the tech subreddit or Digg (which has become largely useless to tech professionals as its moved away from its roots).

A few items I’ve found via Hacker News include:

• Why everything you think about User Centered Design in Wrong
• On Self Promotion
• The death of the boring blog post

#2 – A VC

(http://www.avc.com)

Fred writes compelling pieces consistently, almost never gets preachy, is self-promotional in a highly credible and useful way and brings up topics I wouldn’t have thought about without him. Most of us can’t have Fred on our boards or as an investor, but we can get into his head via his blog and participating more in the comments there has been a priority of mine for a while (he’s built a remarkable community in the comments).

Some favorite posts:

• Tenacity
• The "We Need to Own" Baloney
• Ten Characteristics of Great Companies

#3 – Chris Dixon

(http://cdixon.org)

Chris, like Fred, delivers crystal clear value propostions with his posts. And IMO, he’s even higher signal to noise than Fred. I don’t always agree with him on everything, but I like the way he thinks about problems, I like the ones he brings up and I think he has his finger intensely on the pulse of what startups and technologists (and technical marketers like SEOs) are thinking about and dealing with. It’s a pleasure to see a new post from Chris – here’s to hoping he makes many more in 2010.

Some favorites include:

• Why the web will continue to grow rapidly
• Man and superman
• Software patents should be abolished

#4 – Techmeme

(http://techmeme.com)

Techmeme is an obvious choice, but it’s also critical to the list. If it weren’t for Techmeme, I’d have to wade through ReadWriteWeb, Mashable and Techcrunch post-by-post, every day. Don’t ever leave us, Gabe.

No specific posts here – there’s far too many to name, and the site updates much too quickly for me to even recall all the great stuff I’ve found here. However, I will say that I highly recommend m.techmeme.com for mobile browsing. It’s been a joy to scroll through every time my wife takes extra-long in the dressing room at Anthropologie.

#5 – Answers On Startups

(http://answers.onstartups.com)

Launched just this past October, Answers On Startups has become a haven for learning more about the challenges, issues and questions entrepreneurs face in the technology world. I’ve recommended it before, and early on participated heavily (and I’d like to do more of that in the future), but if you’re seeking answers from highly authoritative folks in a scalable fashion, this is the spot. I’m really impressed by the quality of many contributions there - the signal to noise is pretty exceptional.

Some of the best include:

• What’s more important: release fast or getting it right?
• Free Trial vs. Freemium
• Qualities/skills of a CEO

#6 – Daring Fireball

(http://daringfireball.net)

In my ideal world, 5 years from now, when I’ve been put out to pasture by someone smarter and more capable, or bought out I’d have a blog like this. Some entries are just links, some are lengthy and thoughtful and all are interesting and worth reading. Author John Gruber also brings a remarkably diverse range of topics to the site and yet somehow, signal to noise remains high.

A few recent picks:

• Google’s Meaning of Open (a short, but flawless skewering)
• The Next iPhone
• A Liberal, Accurate Regex Pattern for Matching URLs

#7 – Steve Blank

(http://steveblank.com)

A few of Steve’s posts are not only relevant, but serve to actually change direction in the executive ranks here at SEOmoz. That’s high praise, but if you read the blog, you’ll see what I mean. Steve’s been there, and his experiences run in shocking parallel to the issues we face or worry about on a regular basis. Even when I disagree with points, the logic and thought he puts into the post makes for a great read and a hard think.

Some of his best:

• The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas are No Longer Free
• Lies Entrepreneurs Tell Themselves
• Good Enough Decision Making

#8 – NYTimes Most Emailed

(http://www.nytimes.com/gst/mostemailed.html)

Despite the financial and institutional problems they face, the NYTimes still puts out absolutely phenomenal content on nearly every area of life. From cooking to politics, travel to health, there is amazing material to be found in the Grey Lady, and the Most Emailed list is the place to find the best of the best.

Some favorites:

• Twitter Chatter During the Superbowl (I love their interactive graphics)
• Using Menu Psychology to Entice Diners
• Google Keeps Tweaking its Search Engine
• 100 Things Restaurant Staffers Should Never Do (Part 1)

#9 - Venture Hacks

(http://venturehacks.com)

 When I was out trying to raise a second round of VC this summer (big mistake – more on that in a future post), Venturehacks’ historic content was invaluable. However, visiting the site made me realize how much good stuff there is that doesn’t apply only to those currently raising money. They’ve got some seriously great writers/contributors, invaluable interviews and tackle tough subjects.

My personal favorites recently included:

• 10 Skills I look for before writing a check
• How to develop your customers like you develop your product
• The Arrogant VC: Why VCs are disliked by entrepreneurs

#10 – Twittersphere

(http://twittersphere.com)

Since they don’t publish archives (the most frustrating feature), I’m unable to show off just how cool this site is and has been over the last few months, but just try visiting a couple times a day for the next few weeks and you’ll see. It’s remarkable how much good stuff gets re-tweeted (and how much junk – signal to noise is about 15%, which is still decent since it’s easy to skim and consume at will). You can also get a sense for how important Twitter’s link graph is to the engines through Twittersphere – a lot of pages that have 0 links will have thousands of tweets pretty fast.

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Your turn! I’d love to see the sites outside the SEO world that give you the most professional value (and I’m certain the rest of our readers would too). Feel free to link drop even to yourself, so long as it’s relevant

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Although news outlets continually bring reports about new features on social sites such as Facebook and Twitter, there is actually a lot happening with social aggregation sites as well. To catch us up to speed, Brent Csutoras gave WebProNews a rundown of the latest news from both Digg and StumbleUpon.

First of all, Digg has a new trending feature that allows users to be more involved in the actual voting process. Since people are always complaining about the items that reach the front page, Digg is incorporating this new feature to give users more of an opportunity to vote on a particular item.

On Digg’s homepage, the feature will display an item that is close to being moved to the front page and give users 10 minutes to vote to move it or not. After the 10 minutes are up, the feature will show whether or not the item was moved.

StumbleUpon has also seen some drastic changes over the last several months. Earlier this year, the company broke away from eBay and is currently being run by its original founders. Since becoming independent again, StumbleUpon revamped its design, added more content to its homepage, and essentially, tried to become more like the other social sites.

Most recently, the site has made an attempt to focus on the social profile. Csutoras however, does not welcome this change. For him, StumbleUpon was different from the other social sites. He relied on StumbleUpon for finding really unbiased and good content from anyone. But now, the content is heavily dependent upon the social group that recommended it, much like Facebook and Twitter.

“It does put an extra click or two between you and content,” he said.

All these changes are currently in beta and Csutoras is quick to point out that StumbleUpon is very good about listening to user feedback.

What are your thoughts on the new features from Digg and StumbleUpon?

A guest post from Glen ViperChill.

I’ve read a lot of blogging success stories in my four-year blogging history. Sadly, they’ve always been about other people, rather than me. And, when I do see them, although they are real, I get a sense that the owner didn’t have to work as hard as I have. I see people getting big on Digg yet my domain is banned for no reason or linked to by Seth Godin and getting ‘famous’ overnight. I don’t want to sound bitter, but it just seemed like success was happening to everyone else.

Once I had this realisation, I decided that if I wasn’t going to get featured on Digg or Delicious for my new site, I would work on:

• Being the most authentic blogger in my niche
• Providing the best content that I can
• Interacting within my community as much as possible.

And what happened? In one year I managed to build my blog to just over 4,000 subscribers. Sure, it isn’t the success story that everyone else raves about, but it’s realistic and it is attainable. Or maybe I’m being hard on myself, because I don’t see that many blogs reaching these numbers either.

1. Getting 500 Subscribers is Much Harder than 1,000

Some of you might be completely confused by that statement and to others it will make perfect sense; let me explain. When I look at my own stats, I can see that it took me 5 months to reach 500 subscribers (which isn’t a bad rate of growth at all). Can you guess how many it took to reach 1,000? Just two.

You see, when I first started out, I was a complete nobody in my niche. I was fairly known in the internet marketing industry but totally unheard of when it came to personal development. Because of that, I had to establish a brand. I went with a logo people would remember, a unique design, and a desire to focus on content that simply helped people be who they want to be. Everything I would write would have the focus of helping people get what they want out of life.

From there I started commenting on other blogs, being active in Twitter and writing the best articles I could. I worked hard, but within a few months I was at the 500 subscriber mark. Once you get to this stage, things start getting much, much easier because when you’re trying to promote content that has no audience, you have to find people who might want to read it and show up where they are. Once you have an audience and write great content, they’re going to start sharing it for you.

If you’re struggling to get your first few hundred subscribers then don’t worry, as they’re far harder to get than the next few hundred. With the 5 months left in the year I managed to grow my site by another 3,000 subscribers. How’s that for exponential growth.

2. If You’re Going to Guest Post, Vary Your Audience

I have been one of the most active guest posters on the internet in the last few months and for one simple reason: guest posting works. It gets you out there in front of a new audience and just as importantly, an audience that understands blogs and what they are all about. If someone subscribers to another blog in your niche, there’s a good chance they will subscribe to yours if you’re writing great content. One thing I have noticed some people do is “piggyback” off a certain blog and try to write there as often as possible.

This is usually for big blogs which can help you get a lot of traffic and subscribers quite quickly, but things will soon die down. If someone has seen you guest post on a site 5 times and still haven’t subscribed, they probably won’t when you write your 6th article. There are a few benefits to varying your guest posting which include:

• Reaching a new audience: If you’re going for the same sites all the time, you’re going to reach the same readers. By varying your activities you can reach new eyeballs that want your content.
• Creating new connections: Guest posting shouldn’t just be thought of as something you can do to benefit your own site, but also something you can do to help the author of another site. Most bloggers love free content in return for a backlink so if you can help as many people as possible, there’s no harm in that

3. Find Ways to Collaborate with Others

As a blogger, I’m quite sad about the rise of Twitter in a way. Instead of the hundreds of backlinks a good blog post could get a few years ago, it will now get hundreds of tweets. Sure the tweets can bring you traffic, but they are not going to help your post move up the ranks in search engines. Even as a way for collaboration, people are focusing on twitter communication rather than working with people via their blogs. Usually these writers are coming from the scarcity mindset and if they link to other bloggers they’re going to lose readers and help their “competitor” grow.

First of all, if you think of other bloggers in your niche as competitors then you have a totally backwards mindset. Secondly, I’m here to tell you that collaborating with other bloggers in my niche has been one of the best things I have done. To begin with, I created a list of the top Personal Development Blogs. This ranks all of the blogs by their statistics and of course helps my site visitors find other amazing blogs to read. This page has been linked to by hundreds of websites and it has helped put me in touch with tons of other bloggers.

On top of that, I also ran a series called the Personal Development face-off. I had the idea thanks to Daniel Scocco doing this in the blogging niche and thought that the content generated here would be excellent. Even though I was featuring two other bloggers on my site every week, hundreds of people emailed me to say how much they loved the series. This positioned me as someone who was at the top of my industry because I had all of these top bloggers taking time out to work with me and because I was sharing the best content in the niche.

Don’t be afraid of promoting other bloggers. These days, I try to promote great content on other sites as much as possible. It will come back your way.

Glen is the author of ViperChill, a blog on Viral Marketing. He aims to help people create remarkable websites that others just naturally want to talk about.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

3 Lessons I Learned Building 4,000 Subscribers in 12 Months

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Posted by randfish

When I first started in SEO, link acquisition was almost always a manual process. I’d search the engines for links that pointed to the competition, find relevant directories and link lists, email relevant sites and beg, borrow or bribe (aka buy advertising) to get a link. I tried reciprocal link building (and did some pretty dumb stuff). Then, as I got more intertwined in the SEO community, I found vendors who built large networks of sites, spammed blogs/forums/guestbooks and ran text link sales operations. I leveraged these services to help clients rank better, almost always with great success. Then I met Matt Cutts, found out more about Google’s webspam team, saw penalties and their impact (remember Florida?) and even found some sites we worked on in the Sandbox.

Over time, I got smarter. I read papers about Hilltop, Trustrank, Anti-Trustrank and many more. I saw sites escaping the sandbox once they’d earned greater quantities of trusted links. I started understanding that Google’s search quality team was only going to get better at recognizing and counting legitimate links (and tossing out the junk), so I focused exclusively on more "white hat" kinds of links. That’s when I discovered linkbaiting and the power of Digg, Reddit & StumbleUpon to drive traffic that would naturally link. We had success with quizzes (and after Matt left SEOmoz, he had a little too much success) and viral content that earned thousands of links overnight and started offering it as a service.

As our clientele and foci changed, we changed again. Linkbait gave way to broader viral marketing efforts. Social media marketing arose as a practical and high quality way to earn links. Our clients became larger brands and organizations and one-off link projects weren’t scalable, so we consulted on tactics like content and technology licensing, training editorial staff to earn links & participate in the social media world themselves, and incentivizing user-generated content, which in turn brought links from those users. We found ways to drive natural links to deep pages on huge sites targeting the long tail, how to combine embeddable content and user-adopted brand affinity to drive link growth. And we stopped buying links entirely.

I figured a visual history might make for a compelling view:

Now, link building is changing again. I’m of the distinct impression that the engines (nowadays referring to Bing & Google, since the others are all but out of the picture) are evolving to keep up with the web’s breakneck speed and new forms of data, along with new ways of analyzing links, are making themselves felt in the SERPs. My guesses/observations would include:

• Twitter really is cannibalizing the web’s link graph, or at least, the blogosphere’s and Google seems to be using Tweet counts in some way (though possibly only in the QDF algo).
• The acceleration rate of link acquisition and the freshness of new links is having a more dramatic impact than before, and the "old crusty links" paradigm may be fading a bit.
• Brand mentions and keyword associations with brand names are influencing the rankings more and more.
• Un-trustworhty link patterns are conferring more filters and penalties than ever before.
• QDD is as strong as ever, and vertical results are more prominent than at any time in the engines’ histories.
• Google and Microsoft both know more about traffic and surfing habits than ever before, and this data is likely being used to, at the least, quality control for potential algorithmic misses.
• Ad blindness is worse than ever (16% of Internet users are responsible for 85% of all ad clicks on the web), forcing the engines to make ads more relevant and more obvious to continue earning revenue.
• Paid inclusion is going away, and talk of potentially paying sites to be in the indices (the reverse model) is in the air (or maybe not).
• Billions of non-linked "references" flow out across the web through social media messages, emails, tweets and IMs. Someone, at some search engine, is undoubetdly mining this data to see how they can derive value and relevancy from it.

As marketers, we have to evolve or be left behind by those who can better adapt. It’s hard to see the forest for the trees right now, but I think we’re closing in on a time when real-time, social and traditional web references are all a part of the rankings equation. The future may be less about links and more about brand building and brand participation. I don’t want to be the most-linked-to site in my niche; I want to be the site that’s synonymous with my niche.

Now we just have to figure out the tactics…

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This week I’m featuring a short series of interviews with successful bloggers looking at a popular post on their blog and why they think it went viral. Today Vitaly Friedman from Smashing Magazine has agreed to dissect the popularity of one of their most popular posts.

1. What is the post on your blog that has had the most traffic in the last 12 months?

The most popular post in our magazine was the article “Adobe Photoshop Tutorials – Best Of” which was published in October 2008. It is one of the many tutorials round-ups that we’ve done then. Overall, the post has now almost a 1,000,000 unique visits.

2. Where did the traffic mainly come from?

Most traffic came from Google, followed by social media, in particular via StumbleUpon, Twitter, Digg and Reddit (in this order). Since we are paying a huge amount of attention and time investment into preparing well-researched, high-quality posts, it is very likely that stories published on SM are going fairly well in social media. After all, almost every story needs over 25 hours to be completed. Another reason for our popularity in social media is the simple fact that we don’t post too often – at most 2 articles per day appear on Smashing Magazine.

About a couple of months after the post was published the organic traffic via Google etc. started to catch up, so at the moment we (on average) have much more traffic from search engines than from social media. All the social media together are still only a small portion of the traffic coming from Google.

3. Did you do anything extra to market or promote this post or did it just happen organically?

We never push a story hard to reach some critical mass of diggs, votes or tweets. The post did well, because many designers found it useful and bookmarked it or recommended it. That’s the basis and the requirements for a good, successful, popular post.

4. What can we as bloggers learn from the success of this post?

The quality of the content defines the nature of post’s popularity over months and years. The more time you invest into preparing a post, the more quality it will deliver to the reader and the more appreciative your readers will be. The latter will deliver your blog organic growth, traffic and solid readership. That’s as simple as that. Deliver quality and you’ll be rewarded with good reputation and good traffic.

5. I notice you’ve got a book coming out soon – how did it come to be? Got any tips for aspiring bloggers wanting to do a book?

Yes, we are currently in the final stage of publishing our “Smashing Book” – a printed book about best practices in modern Web design and development. Books are still valuable, because they are more solid and permanent compared to bits and bytes. The idea to create a book came because we wanted to explore how we can strengthen Smashing branding in further traditional media. We decided to create the community book, a book that is based upon ideas and suggestions of our readers, involving them in basically every step of the process.

Publishing a book is easy these days is easy – with digital printing and numerous layout applications one can create an e-book in hours. The process is also fast and relatively cheap. But this is not what we decided to do. The Smashing Book is printed the traditional way. We aim to the masses. This is possible because we have a huge audience and we are selling to them directly, bypassing common bookstores and shops. To do this we need plenty of money to pay for paper, layout and printing. But there is a traditional solution to go around this, the pre-sale phase. We have started the pre-sale to gather money and estimate the circulation (yes, it’s a secret). In exchange for customer’s trust, we are offering a big discount of 20%.

Since we wanted everybody to be able to afford the Smashing Book, we have decided to introduce something that we call “social shipping”. The idea here is that we offer customers from US and Germany free shipping, but since shipping costs are extremely high to some parts of the world, they can voluntarily pay more for the shipping of their copy. And, of course, selling around the world needs some serious logistics. There are literally tons to move. An e-book would be more much more comfortable, but we hope that our readers will appreciate our efforts to create a physical piece that can be put on the shelf. The printed Smashing Book will appear in the end of this year.

Check out the Smashing Magazin upcoming book (it is available for pre-order) here.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Vitaly Friedman of Smashing Magazine Shares a Popular Post Case Study

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Posted by Danny Dover

 It is a typical Tuesday afternoon in suburbia California. Jenny, a sixteen year old girl is taking a sick day from school. With a runny nose, she sits idly on her bed surfing Facebook. At the same time, 2,000 miles away in Seattle, a twenty-two year old ambitious college drop-out named Kevin is on Twitter complaining about his sore throat. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, a 40 year old single mother in London searches Google on her phone for the location of the nearest Boots drug store so she can buy cold medicine.

If a human from 200 years ago were to look at our planet today, it would appear completely alien. Culture shifts and technology improvements have drastically changed our perceived landscape. One tiny part of this is the use of social media and search engines. More than ever, teenagers are complaining about their parents joining Facebook and parents are complaining about their children interfering with their online social lives. Together they are sharing small events like sore throats, runny noses and big events like floods and hurricanes. Communicating online has become intertwined with our lives and has now become deeply integrated with our work, education and entertainment.

But how did this happen? While I don’t know for sure, I do recognize the patterns. For companies like Twitter, Google, Digg and Facebook, it started with a small group of entrepreneurs in California whose great ideas eventually went viral and spread around the globe. This word ‘viral’ describes a pattern and has become a buzzword. It is usually used to describe the virus like spread of ideas and technologies. The amazing idea behind a virus like spread is it expands exponentially. Once it starts, it multiples and multiples until nothing can stop it.

It is the great irony I see in this buzzward that prompted this post. I believe the viral nature of social media and popular technology companies is what will paradoxically allow us to prevent the viral spread of real viruses and pandemics. This is not a new idea. Many vaccines are in essence inert viruses fighting would-be viruses.

In 2006, a man by the name of Dr. Larry Brilliant won the TED prize for calling for a new global system that could identify pandemics before they spread. Dr. Brilliant (you can’t make this stuff up) is world renowned for his efforts in successfully eradicating smallpox from the planet. Before winning the TED prize, he had been inspired by the potential of a Canadian system called GPHIN. GPHIN is a system of web crawlers and analyzers that scour web based content looking for trends in keywords like ‘fever’, ‘cough’, ‘tired’, ‘sick’ and ‘flu’. Using this methodology, GPHIN was able to detect a would-be SARS outbreak six weeks before any other system (including the systems used by the World Health Organization). Quick responding officials were able to isolate the outbreak and prevent a global pandemic. Dr. Brilliant later said that this possible for two reasons.

1. Early Detection
2. Rapid Response

Shortly after his major call for action, Dr. Brilliant was hired as Executive Director of the then newly formed Google.org. This new philanthropic arm of Google was funded by 1% of all Google profits. Dr. Brilliant eventually used these resources to build an early detection system that is used today to help predict flu trends. He built the system he called for and the world has been better off because of it.

Unfortunately, this is not where the story ends. Larry Brilliant has since left Google for other endeavors. GPHIN and Google Flu Trends continue to save lives but they are only the tip of the iceberg. Google is now falling behind new competitors that dominate the ever growing real-time web. Status updates from Twitter and Facebook are being produced and becoming obsolete so quickly that Google’s index can’t keep up. We saw this with Michael Jackson’s death and we will see it again in the future.

Social media has the potential to become the greatest early detection system that the world has ever seen. It is faster, nimbler and has more access to user data than any traditional search engine. Not only does Facebook have the data necessary to see who is suffering from an illness, it has the data necessary to predict who these ill people will most likely come in contact with. Twitter has the data to make similar predictions (although less accurately because people don’t physically spend time with Twitter friends like they do with Facebook friends) but enjoys the added benefit of being accessed and updated from any place with mobile phone or WIFI service. (90% of Twitter requests are made to it’s API, whereas only 12% of Facebook users access Facebook through it’s mobile apps).

These two social media platforms by themselves have the ability to enable ordinary people to report their symptoms in real-time. Specialists like epidemiologists and statisticians could then identify threats (early detection) and use these same communication channels to direct aid workers (rapid response) on how best to isolate viruses before they become pandemics. If the features of other social media platforms and modern search engines were added to this theoretical system, specialists could for the first time ever educate the global community in real time. (Think about how many people read stories on Digg or about the much larger amount of people who read Google Adsense ads every day.)

Theory and predictions are helpful but just like verbal contracts, they are only worth the paper they are written on. Luckily for us, this theoretical system is already becoming reality today. People are already reporting their symptoms on Twitter and on Facebook. Likewise, disease experts and aid workers are already using social media to organize relief efforts. Although a unified, non-government controlled system for monitoring these platforms doesn’t currently exist, all of the pieces are in place. Dr. Brilliant said that there are two steps necessary for preventing pandemics. Social media is completing the first step (early detection) to a degree that even he couldn’t imagine. Better still, this is not costing the public a dime.

The world is changing in parallel with the internet. Next time you hear someone complain about "pointless" status updates, take the time to explain it to them. Social media is powered by all of us individually. Because of this, you have the ability to make a positive difference.

UPDATE: There has been some very healthy discussion in the comments that I would like to address here. Thank you 0lly and Bludge for bringing this up.

What about false alarms? Clearly, social media will have a lot of noise mixed in with legitimate concerns. Just like good ideas, bad ideas can spread virally as well. Paranoia and misinformation run rampant in the media and online.

So how do medical professionals use a system that will likely have a lot of misinformation and noise? The key is acknowledging that limitation and designing the system to account for it. The reason that GPHIN was so successful, was not that it sent an e-mail directly to health authorities every time someone mentioned "cough", instead it was so powerful because it used aggregate information to identify real trends. Real people, including doctors, look over the information and decide if it is worth pursuing or not. It is natural to assume the front end of a system like this might look something Twitter search with has every relevant Tweet visible. This is not how it works. Instead I think a more accurate representation would be that of Google Flu Trends (aggregate information) with trends that can be broken down by location and with the help of social media, broken down into social groups.

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I am not and do not claim to be a medical or disease expert. If you are, I invite you to help me make this post better. As always, feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments below. If you would rather not do that, feel free to e-mail me. All of my contact information is available on my profile: Danny Thanks!

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Other Similar Discussions:

Twitter: Growing Virally But Can It Stop Viruses? – Chris Thorman writes a very compelling post that adds the use of Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) to the discussion. From the article "The combination of social media and EMRs, in some form or another, will undoubtedly be part of the future of tracking disease outbreaks. The how and when of that process remains complicated, dependent on health agencies, governments and the doctors themselves to implement the appropriate systems."

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Posted by MikeK@DanconiaMedia

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

It’s been said here before: Press releases are much less powerful than they used to be for SEO purposes. While churning out news releases and submitting them to free sites may not do much, the medium can actually be more powerful than ever if used right. Convincing a single reporter or high-profile blogger to pick up your news is infinitely more beneficial than posting worthless releases all over the place and Digg’ing and StumbleUpon’ing them with your multiple accounts.

I have a somewhat unique perspective about news releases. Not too long ago, I worked full-time as a newspaper reporter, and my inbox was regularly inundated with press releases. Some of them caught my attention and were turned into lengthy stories. Others, however, failed to captivate me or my peers and, as a result, went nowhere.

Here are some tips on how to craft your releases in a way that increases the odds of them getting noticed by the media:

Get to the point. Make it clear from the get-go what your release is about. Don’t try to be cute. I used to get releases all the time from PR people who buried the news or tried to get creative with their writing. Sometimes, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what some releases were even about. If you’re looking for a creative outlet, press release writing is not the avenue. Try writing a short story.

At least pretend you’re objective. Obviously, you have a vested interest in what you’re writing about, but it’s still important to craft your releases like down-the-middle news stories. Avoid unnecessary adjectives; most adjectives are unneeded. You don’t want your release to read like an advertisement. Pick out the newsiest element and concentrate on that.

Speak English. I see releases all the time that are stuffed with industry jargon that most people do not understand. Don’t assume that what you’re writing about is a familiar subject for the people who’ll read your release. Dumb it down. Assume your release will be read by the densest guy in the room.

Send it out manually. Instead of just dumping your releases into submission sites and hoping someone important notices, email it yourself to media outlets and bloggers you think might be interested in it. If you’re publicizing a new product, send your release to newspapers in the company’s area. If you can, find out which reporters cover the relevant beat and send it to them directly; that usually only takes a phone call.

Have good timing. If you’re looking for coverage, sending your release out on Election Day or after hours on a Friday is goofy. Those are good times to release bad news you’re obligated to report – any White House spokesman will tell you that – but it’ll do you no good unless your story is wildly sensational. News outlets are typically more desperate for copy during the summer months and around holidays.

Act like a human. Interactivevoices’ post about getting a link from CNN.com – the only PR10 news site – illustrated this perfectly. There’s no harm in picking up the phone and calling reporters directly to see if they’re interested in your story. For all you know, the only thing preventing your news from being published is an over-finicky spam filter.

Don’t beg. When I was working as a reporter, I didn’t realize why some sources were so hellbent on me including links in my stories. Now I know. If your link is relevant to the story, the reporter will probably include it. If not, you’re still getting good publicity.

Of course, all of this will only help if you actually have something worthwhile to say. If you think there’s nothing interesting to say about your enterprise, you’re probably wrong. You just need to think long and hard to figure out what it is.

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This morning I tweeted this question – ‘what are the first 3 things you do when you get online in the morning?‘

You can see many of the answers to the question on this twitoaster thread.

A number of people asked me to answer the question for myself – so I thought I’d do so as a blog post as it is pretty relevant to how I run my business. Of course I couldn’t just stop at three – here’s some of my morning routine:

Firstly: I liken most of what I do in the mornings to a Triage in the emergency room of a hospital. It’s about assessing what happened over night, identifying urgent things that need immediate attention and less urgent but important things that I need to prioritize and then mapping out how I’ll use my day.

Note: Preceding all of what follows is Coffee…. without it I find very little of it works.

1. Check Blog Stats

The first thing I do in the morning is to check the stats of my blogs. While this might seem like a bit of an egotistical thing to do first thing in the morning I actually do it because it gives me a very quick overview of any problems or opportunities that might need my immediate attention.

I am particularly looking for any spikes or lulls in traffic.

Spikes indicate that something has happened to bring me traffic on some other site. This could indicate a social media event (front page on Digg or a hot link on Twitter) or could indicate something more controversial that someone has written about me. Either way – I want to know about it – either for damage control or to see if there’s a way to extend the positives.

Lulls in traffic indicate potential problems with servers or other problems on my blogs including broken design, posts not going live, newsletters not going out that should have gone etc.

What flows from analyzing stats could be leaving comments on another blog to respond to what they’ve written, tweeting a hot link to extend it’s viral qualities, fixing an error on my site, checking server errors etc.

2. Scan Twitter Accounts

I find Twitter is another great source of being able to assess what I’ve missed while I slept. This is particularly important for me because I’m in Australia and actually sleep during the peak times on my blogs when most of my readers are online.

I scan three main things on Twitter – my Direct Messages, my @replies and trending topics (via Twitscoop).

Twitter quickly reveals any topics/stories/news that has broken over night that could be relevant to my blogs. Many times I have links that have been DM’d to me by my followers alerting me to these stories.

I am also on the look out from any problems with my sites that readers are reporting (I find that if one of my blogs was down even for 5 minutes that I’m told about it on Twitter).

Lastly on Twitter I’m looking with interest at what people ReTweeted overnight – particularly posts on my own blogs. If I notice a post I’ve written is doing well on Twitter and has a lot of RT’s it can be worth me giving it a second push. It might also indicate to me that it could be worth writing a followup post on the topic to keep the momentum going.

If a story has not been RT’d much at all it’s an indication that perhaps the post needs reworking or that it wasn’t a topic that connected with my audience.

3. Scan News Alerts

This is a quick one but can be important. I have a number of alerts set up in Google News and Blog Alerts that I quickly scan each morning (it’s my ‘vanity folder‘). Each of these alerts is either an alert to anyone using my name, blog URL or a keyword relevant to my niche in a blog post or news article.

It’s important to know what has been written about you and about topics you’re writing about as this can lead to all kinds of opportunities and interactions (not to mention damage control). I generally don’t respond immediately to these unless they’re urgent but they’re good to keep in mind as I plan my day.

4. Scan Email

Are there any urgent matters in my inbox needing my immediate attention? This is a real challenge as most mornings I wake up to around 100 emails in my inbox (this is after another 500-700 emails are filtered automatically in Gmail using techniques that I talked about in this post on clearing your inbox.)

I don’t reply to many emails at this point – I’m just scanning them looking for important stuff (I don’t always see it unfortunately). I come back to email later in the day.

5. Scan my A-list of RSS feeds

In Google Reader (my RSS reader of choice) I have a folder called ‘A-list’. In this folder I have around 20 feeds from blogs and news sites that I read religiously each day. These are feeds I want to read because they have important news, stories or posts that are directly relevant to my niches.

They are from thought leaders or news sources – I want to know what they say and I want to know it as soon as I can after they write it.

Many days what I read in these feeds will lead me to a post that bounces off their stories, informs me of new products that have been released overnight or alert me to controversy or hot topics in my niche.

Then What?

The above process usually takes me around 15 minutes (on a normal morning where there’s nothing that needs an immediate response).

Remember it’s simply about scanning rather than stopping to respond – unless there’s something important.

At the end of this process I generally have a list of a number of things that I need to achieve in the day ahead. I then attempt to plan my day combining the list I’ve compiled with other tasks that need to be done.

Usually at this point I identify posts that I want to write and publish for the day, schedule in other marketing or admin tasks etc.

I tend to ‘batch’ my tasks together so that I’m not flitting from one thing to the next but instead am setting aside chunks of time for different activities.

Once I’ve got a plan for my day (that usually takes me 5 more minutes to compile) I get to it and start to knock off the things on my list.

One More Tip

I use Firefox and have a number of bookmark folders set up. One of these folders is called ’start up’. It contains the following bookmarks:

• All my stats packages
• TwitScoop
• Google Reader
• Gmail
• A couple of news related sites

Each morning I simply hit ‘command/startup folder’ and each of these sites opens up in a tab of its own. I have them in the order that I’ve mentioned above and simply work through the tabs one at a time. This way I don’t have to think about what I need to do next – all my stats are there ready for me to take a look at first, TwitScoop is open next so I can look at that…. etc

Of course I have to open my Twitter client (I’m using Tweetie at the moment primarily) to check my twitter accounts but apart from that everything I need is open in a tab of its own for me to work through. I simply close down tabs and move on to the next ones as I move through the list.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Watch How I Spend My First 20 Minutes Online Every Morning

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Here’s a quick tip that I think a lot of bloggers could learn from – run a ‘town hall’ meeting on your blog.

The inspiration from this comes from Digg who are periodically run a ‘Town Hall’ webcast for their members.

The idea is simple – Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson from Digg periodically do a webcast for their members that gives information on the latest news at Digg as well as answering questions from their members. They’ve been running these on a quarterly basis at Digg for over a year now – you can see them all here.

OK – so what’s this got to do with your blog?

Here’s the thing – while Digg are obviously a lot bigger than your average blog and they have more resources to throw at creating these types of Town Hall webcasts – I think bloggers can learn from the idea.

While I’ve never used the term ‘town hall’ meeting on my blogs I have periodically done similar types of things for readers where I product updates on how the blogs are going, talk about new directions and take questions.

Benefits of Town Hall Type Meetings with Blog Readers

What I’ve found is that when you communicate these types of things it can have a real impact upon your reader community in a variety of ways:

• Reader Moral – every time I do this type of exercise I see signs of reader moral lifting.
• Reader Involvement – perhaps tied to the moral of your readers is that when you communicate with them about how you’re blog is going I’ve noticed that they often will get more involved with it.
• Gives Your Blog a ‘Face’ – one of the main benefits that I’ve noticed about these sorts of sessions when I’ve done them on video using Ustream is that it gives your blog a more personal edge. Readers get to see and hear what you’re like and come away feeling a different kind of connection than they get just reading your content.

<li>Clearing up Misconceptions – giving readers a chance to tell you what they think of your blog and to listen to your response can help clear up misconceptions that they might have about you or your site.

• Reader Involvement – getting readers involved in your blog in any way (even if it’s just asking a question or watching a video/web cast) means that they’re investing something of themselves into your blog. What comes out of these interactions can be all kinds of great ideas that they can give you – not to mention the things you might ask them to DO in promoting your community to their own network.
• Readers Using Your Blog Better – these sorts of ‘town hall’ meetings give you an opportunity to point out features of your blog that readers might not be aware of to help them to use it better. For example, pointing out the social media bookmarking buttons on your blog, explaining how to subscribe via RSS, showing off a newsletter you produce – all of these things can deepen reader engagement/satisfaction and help you grow your blog.

While not all of your readers will be interested on the behind the scenes goings on of your blog – some will.

How do you run a TownHall meeting?

There will be many variations on doing this type of thing and I encourage bloggers to find a medium and method that works best for them. Some that come straight to mind include:

• Live Video Web Cast – a live video streaming session like the guys at Digg do. They have a pretty professional set up that will be beyond most of us but it’s pretty easy to set up a video streaming session with a site like Ustream – then all you need to do is publicize it.
• Recorded Video Session – feeling nervous about a live call? Why not ask readers to submit questions ahead of time and then record your answers on video at your own time. Edit it up and put the video on YouTube (or your favorite video hosting site) and embed it on your blog.
• Live or Recorded Audio Sessions – the same two things can be done via audio. This is perhaps a little more accessible for your audience if they don’t have bandwidth for video – or is good for those who don’t like to see themselves on camera.
• Q&A Posts – a simpler option is to call for questions in a blog post and then to write another one with your answers.
• Chat Sessions – I know a few bloggers who have weekly times that they tell their readers they’ll be in a chat room attached to their blog. These sessions are for general chat but often have a Q&A section where readers ask about the topic of the blog as well as questions about the site.

Have you ever run a town hall type meeting for the readers of your blog? How did you do it? What were the challenges and benefits?

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Run a Town Hall Meeting on Your Blog and Increase Reader Engagement

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Posted by rebecca

Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week:

• Compete has rolled out a bunch of changes, adding user generated tags, a new interface, dynamic graphs, and more.
• Pete Meyers has hired a new intern, Yoozer, and he’s here to answer your toughest questions about usability.
• Are you a small business and scratching your head about this newfangled Twitter thing? Check out this Twitter guide for small businesses and hop on the 140 character bandwagon.
• Man, Twitter is all over the place lately. Is it bad for journalism? Marc Gunther seems to think so…
• Last Twitter link (for now): Brent Payne is all…well, atwitter (sorry) over the fact that Alyssa Milano responded to his tweets. [insert lame Who's the Boss joke here] 
• Tony Adam counters Darren Slatten’s theme winning post about reputation management with a post saying online reputation management does matter. I smell a feud!
• 10e20 offers up some basic tips for online and offline social networking. PROTIP: Befriend Chris Winfield. He and his hair are among the most powerful social media marketers in the biz.

• Researchers have used a brain interface to post to Twitter (check out a video of the brain computer interface in action). I for one welcome our new tweeting computer overlords.  
• My amigo Greg wrote an informative post on getting to know Mixx, a digg-esque social media site. He includes some good tips on how to use the site and get maximum benefit from it.
• Matt McGee is mad as hell about Google Maps, and he’s not gonna take it anymore!

• Danny Sullivan recently wrote a great post about expired domains and whether their links still count. Check it out–hopefully it’ll address your burning questions about buying and redirecting old domains.
• KnowEm.com is a cool new service that allows you to check the availability of a user name across 120 social media sites. 

YOUmoz entries:

• What Are Your Thoughts on Optimizing for Product Variations? Sahota talks about options for ranking for long tail product keyphrases and product variations.
• SEO Checklist in a Hurry – Audit List. Filipe Santos provides us with 5 items to check when doing a site audit.
• Dear Spammers Sending Out Emails to SEOmoz Members. Kenneth Dreyer lays the smackdown on recent spammers blasting SEOmoz members with emails.
• The Google Gods Strike Again… Fizzarotti experiences some issues with how Google is classifying his URLs.
• ‘Putting Out’ to ‘Score’ on Social Media. MTurek talks about privacy issues and concerns with social media and social networking accounts.
• Google Adwords Optimisation and Account Limits. Hannahm23 shows us how to submit more keywords and ad groups to Adwords.

Best of YOUmoz:

• A Better Web Development Process Based On the Concept of Link Bait. John McElborough talks about the standard web development process and thinks it should start with content strategy and link building.
• Small Business SEO: Starting with the Right Success Metrics. Rishi continues his small business SEO blogging series by talking about success indicators and metrics.
• Link Building from A to Z. Wiep.net shares 26 great link building tips starting from A to Z.

New additions to the SEOmoz Marketplace:

Featured job postings:

• SEO marketing finance manager for Embarq’s Interactive Services in Wake Forest, NC
• PPC online marketing internship for Orchid Box in London, UK
• Contracted SEO analyst for Swimwear Express in Cleveland, OH
• Contracted channel partner for MaximumHit
• Web marketing specialist for Stone Interactive Group in Ann Arbor, MI
• Web design and development specialist for Metter Advertising in Coopersburg, PA
• SEO specialist for Predator Nutrition in Leeds, UK

Featured companies:

United States:

• Rdezine in Baltimore, MD
• Defcon Servers in Connecticut
• KVCHosting in Edmond, OK
• Maine Hosting Solutions in Bath, Maine
• Rise and Shine SEO in San Diego, CA
• My Newsletter Builder in Asheville, NC
• Dean Arrow in Colorado

Canada:

• Measure Marketing Results in Toronto, ON

UK:

• Com. Motion Consulting in Edinburgh, UK
• Orchid Box Limited in London, UK

Europe:

• Pixabit GmbH in Leonberg, Germany

Asia:

• ISE Web Solution in Bangalore, India
• Global Online Solution in Delhi, India
• Maximum Hit in Noida, India
• VietSEO in Hanoi, Vietnam
• Intechno in Beijing, China

Australia:

•   Red Meets Blue Design in Perth, Australia

Featured resumes:

Currently looking:

• Rudy Dallal was the webmaster and SEO specialist for the NY Film Academy and is currently looking for SEO work.
• Alessio Nanni is a PHP/MySQL coder with extended knowledge of all CSM and bulletin systems. He’s also proficient in XML and CSS, Python, C, Javascript, Actionscript (Flash) and has general Graphic knowledge.

Happily Employed:

• Justin March works on a range of online marketing projects in Stonehouse near Stroud in Gloucestershire, UK.

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