February, 2010

Be My Friend?

There's a tremendous amount of buzz these days about social media. It seems like everyone is either tweeting, blogging, friending on Facebook, or trying to make money advising others on how to do so.  Social media, aka social networking, can be useful to your business but you have to know some basics and budget your time wisely.  

First, networking online should be seen as one element in your overall networking and marketing strategy. Most businesses need both an online and an in-person networking presence. If you only have one or the other you're leaving too many stones unturned.  Networking online can drive traffic to your website. It can connect you with people you wouldn't have met otherwise. And it can help you keep track of people you want to stay connected with but don't see often.

Over the next few months I'm going to cover some of the essentials of social media in this newsletter. And tons of material is available online; I'll be giving links to some helpful sites each month. Finally, social media has been around long enough that there are now good books on how to do it effectively. One book I recommend is Friends with Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook.

Dave Salahi

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Getting to Know Blogs (long version)

A good place to start your social media campaign is with a blog. As you may know, a blog is like an online journal, or log ("blog" is short for weblog), that is written by an individual or a company. It's typically updated daily or weekly with the latest news about your company and your products or your industry. However, as with your website and newsletter, you also want to make sure that it's not just all about you. You need to provide some useful information or incentives for your readers.

Boost Your Search Engine Rankings witha Blog

One advantage of starting a blog is that it will help your website's search engine rankings. Search engines like websites that are regularly maintained with fresh content. By posting regularly to your blog you help to keep your website up to date. This assumes that you maintain your blog on the same domain as your website; e.g., www.yourcompany.com/blog or blog.yourcompany.com. However, if you build your blog on another domain, such as WordPress.com, then your blog won't actually be on your website. In this case, the new material isn't seen by Google as updates to your website. However, your blog can still help build your search engine rankings because you can include links from your blog to your site. Each additional link on the web that goes to your website is a vote for your site and helps your ranking.

Reading blogs

For those who are unfamiliar with blogs a good place to start is to find some blogs that you’d like to read on a regular basis and subscribe to them. An easy way to find blogs is to Google them. Simply search for "[topic] blogs" where "[topic]" is whatever topic you're interested in. Another place to find blogs is on technorati; here's a page with their top 100 blogs. You can also search for blogs on the Technorati home page. You're likely to find blogs on any topic you're interested in.

Once you find a blog you can subscribe in a variety of ways. Current versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and other browsers provide the ability to create bookmarks which are blog subscriptions.

Subscribing to a Blog in Internet Explorer

In Internet Explorer 8 the Command Bar displays the common RSS symbol whenever you're on a page containing a blog feed. To subscribe, first click that symbol to go to the blog's RSS feed page. When you get to the feed page you'll see a link near the top of the page saying "Subscribe to this feed." Simply click that link and choose a folder (by default, Feeds) to create the bookmark in. To see your list of feeds and the titles of the posts in each one turn on your Feeds pane (View → Explorer Bars → Feeds). From there you can click on each blog and read the latest news.

Subscribing to a Blog in Firefox

To subscribe in Firefox look for the orange RSS logo at the right side of the address bar (where the website's address, e.g., www.yourcompany.com, is shown). Whenever you're on a blog with an RSS feed you'll see that icon which you can then click on to subscribe to the blog. Clicking will take you to the page's RSS feed. Near the top of that page you'll see a Subscribe Now button. Click that button and choose a folder to put the bookmark in. After you've subscribed when you look in your bookmarks you'll see a folder with the RSS icon for each blog to which you've subscribed. Within each folder the titles of the recent blog posts are shown. You can click any title to go directly to that post on the blog.

Subscribing to a Blog in Safari

To subscribe to a blog in Safari look for a gray RSS logo at the right side of the address bar  bar (where the website's address, e.g., www.yourcompany.com, is shown). Whenever you're on a blog with an RSS feed you'll see that icon which you can then click on to subscribe to the blog. Clicking will take you to the page's RSS feed. At the bottom of the right column you'll see an "Add Bookmark…" link. Click that link to subscribe. After you've subscribed you can return to this page by clicking the link in your bookmarks.

Other Blog Readers

Other browsers use similar procedures for subscribing to blogs. Microsoft Outlook 2007 also has the ability to subscribe to blog feeds so that you can read the latest blog news along with your email. In the Mail Folders you'll see an RSS Feeds folder. Right click on it and choose Add a New RSS Feed. To complete this action you'll need the URL of the blog's feed. This is usually easy to find on the blog. Look for a link that says Subscribe or for the orange RSS logo. Click that link and you'll get to the RSS feed page. From there, you can copy and paste the URL from the browser into Outlook.

Other options for reading blogs include Google Reader and Newsgator's FeedDemon.

Conclusion

Reading blogs is a great way to keep up on the latest business information and tech industry news. The key is to find the best blogs for your area of interest and then browse them quickly to find the most relevant information. Subscribing to blogs can help you quickly scan the content from lots of blogs without spending a lot of time actually visiting blog sites.

And reading some popular blogs will give you a good feel for the type of information typically found on blogs, blog writing styles, and the comment culture. (Many blogs allow visitors to comment or give feedback on blog posts.) After you've spent a few weeks reading blogs maybe you'll be ready to start your own blog. This can be easy to do with free services like WordPress.com  and blogger.com. And, of course, you can add a blog directly to your website for a more professional blog presence. I'll cover some of those options next month.

And if you have questions about any of the above please contact me at dave@artistic-webdesign.com or 949-362-0842.

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