eCommerce Website Solution

Social Media and Business Blogging

Wikipedia defines Social Media as “the online tools and platforms that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other. Social media can take many different forms, including text, images, audio, and video. Popular social mediums include blogs,message boards, podcasts, wikis, and vlogs.”

What do we call Social Media? Networking on Steriods.

One of the biggest driving forces of the internet today is what we call the socialization factor. The use of blogs and social media as a means to exchange information is not only growing but growing at an alarmingly rapid rate! According to Technorati (a blog search site) founder David Sifry, the number of blogs has been doubling every five months for the last three years. That translates into approximately 70,000 new blogs created everyday - one per minute!

Obviously the technology and use of social media as a means of communicating will continue to spread. Businesses that can learn to participate in this online discussion by providing REAL information, not just promotional hype, can certainly look forward to a competitive advantage.

A Web feed is a method for easily distributing online content. The technical format that makes it possible is called RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary. Hundreds of thousands of bloggers, podcasters and videobloggers publish feeds to keep themselves better connected to their audience/customers. You can subscribe to content feeds from any one of the biggest names on the web like USATODAY.com, ABCNews, CNET, Yahoo!, and many, many more. The best thing about content feed syndication is that it is open and available to anyone. You can syndicate your blog content or your web site content. And there is very little, if any, cost involved.

You can use a blog to educate your customers and to provide added resources in addition to what’s on your site. And, of course, you can use it to drive customers to your virtual front door.

Blog Resources:

http://typepad.com

http://wordpress.com

http://communityserver.org/

http://www.blogger.com/start

SEO for Blogs

·      Use main keyword/search phrases Associated with Blog in Meta title, description and keywords

·      Use chicklets and rss feed icons on blogs for subscription purposes

·      Use trackback links to other blogs with similar content where applicable

·      Submit Blogs to Major Blog Directories and Services. To add to the directories use blog rss feed address not blog address. See Directory/Services Listing Below:

-         http://www.Getblogs.com

-         http://www.Technorati.com

-         http://www.Blogsearchengine.com

-         http://www.globeofblogs.com

-         http://www.blogwise.com

-         http://www.feedster.com

·        Use keywords in title, anchor text links and 3-4 times in blog post

·        Post Daily (this is really the only way to get the search engine to re-index the blog daily)

·        Read other blogs and post comments and use the comment feature to include a link back to your blog

·       Use Ping-o-matic or Pingoat to “ping” your blogs. Pinging let’s search engines know that your blog has been updated.