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- Influencers Are Real, But they're Not Always Who You Expect
This guest post is by Dan Zarella of of danzarrella.com.
I find myself in the quantity of followers versus quality of followers debate quite a bit. And one of the fundamental questions of that argument is the concept of influencers. There are clearly some social media users who have more reach and more influence than others, and it is obviously a good thing to have as many of them following you as possible.
Content sharing frequency
(Source)A few years ago, when Twitter had just launched and was used primarily by social media geeks, I did a survey. I asked takers how often then shared content with their friends. I found that people who were on Twitter tended to share content more frequently. Those bleeding edge social media users were clearly more influential. For many mainstream markets, whose customer bases aren't full of hardcore social media users, the percentage of the audience who is on social media (especially the newer platforms) tends to be more influential and connected.
Great tools like Klout and Twitter Grader exist to help you identify influential users, but it becomes tricky and often expensive in terms of time and resources to scale your reach by targeting individual, high-value users.
Death hoax timeline
(Source)On the flip side of the coin is the concept of contextual influence. A few months ago there was a death hoax about Nelson Mandela on Twitter. A few Blackberry messenger spam was sent to a number of South African people one morning informing them that Mandela had died. One user, @lebolukewarm, tweeted the phrase "RIP Nelson Mandela" and got around 70 retweets. The phrase then began to trend worldwide on Twitter and received mainstream media coverage.
Lebolukewarm isn't traditionally influential. He had less than 1,000 followers when the hoax started. He would never show up on any Klout report. It's nearly impossible to specifically target this kind of influencer, he was just in the right place at the right time. The same was true for many of the users who got tons of ReTweets about Osama Bin Ladin's capture.
The only way to optimize for having influencers like Lebo following you is to cast a wide net. Since you can't target users like him, you can only hope to get a lot of followers, thereby increasing the probability that someone like him is following you.
Dan Zarrella is the award-winning social media scientist at HubSpot and host of the upcoming webinar: The Science of Social Media on August 23rd at 2PM ET.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
Influencers Are Real, But they're Not Always Who You Expect
Переслать - Getting Started with Webmaster Tools: Fixing 404 Errors
This guest post is by Dave Taylor of DaveTaylorOnline.com.
Whether you're writing about changing diapers, improving your bowling score, finding a job in the travel industry or how you get pictures off your cellphone, I think it's a universal truth that if you're writing online, you want better search engine results placement.
Most likely you've installed some SEO plugins that promise to improve your results and they might even be working, but if your site's been up any length of time, it's quite probable that things have started to break behind the scenes and hurt your results without you ever being notified. A scary prospect, really, and if it's dramatic enough, you can start to really sink down the search results without any further explanation.
That's why Google has its Webmaster Tools and while they're primarily designed for people who have complete control over their Web site it can even be useful if you're on blogger.com, wordpress.com or typepad.com. in fact, you don't need to be a blogger to find it helpful: problems hurt any site, regardless of its structure.
Proving your own site
The first thing you need to do with Google's Webmaster Tools is verify that the site you want to analyze is your own. This is typically done by adding a special line of HTML to the head of your home page, as I detail here.
If you can't change your header, there are some alternatives that Google offers, but if you have zero administrative rights on the site, you might well be out of luck. If so, check with your hosting company to see if it offers alternative administrative tools that let you know about broken links, etc.
Key elements of a Webmaster Tools report
Once you have verified ownership of your site, you'll see on the left side that the major areas are Site configuration, Your site on the web, +1 Metrics, Diagnostics, and Labs. Below it there's some help that really highlights what you can glean from the Tools: Crawl errors, Search queries, Links to your site and Sitemaps. All good stuff.
Google Webmaster Tools overview for APparenting.com
There's good analytic data that appears to be somewhat of an overlap with what you can get from Google Analytics (or your favorite analytics package if that's not your particular cup of tea) and sometimes it reveals things that perhaps you didn't want to know, like "sexy girls" is the #1 search for people who get to my Attachment Parenting Blog. Yikes. Not what I write about on my site nor anything I want people to be seeking when they arrive on my blog.
The heart of the Webmaster Tools, however, are the diagnostics because it's the primary way we can learn what Google's search spider finds broke on the site. Go to Diagnostics and it further breaks down into Malware, Crawl errors, Crawl stats, Fetch as Googlebot and HTML suggestions.
All good stuff, but let's go into Crawl errors as it offers great bang for your proverbial buck.
Crawl errors Webmaster Tools reports for APparenting.com
Not too bad. This blog has a few hundred pages but I'm only seeing 36 of the hated 404 not found errors. Look closely and you'll see that the format is bad link, error encountered, linked from and date detected. The first one is illustrative:
Link: http://www.apparenting.com/cosleeping-cpsc.html
Error: 404 (Not found)
Linked From: 10 pages
Detected: Jul 30, 2011The real value is that if you click on the link that shows how many pages have a link to the bad URL, it'll show you exactly what pages need to be fixed on your site and, sometimes, on other sites too. Here's an example:
Specific crawl errors for APparenting.com
The first link is from another site called bubhub.com.au but all the other pages that link to this bad URL are on my own site. That's something I can fix immediately.
Where to go from here
You can see we've just touched on the tip of the iceberg with the Google Webmaster Tools. It's deep, it's complicated, but even if you just poke around and look at the 404 errors generated for your own blog and fix as many as possible, you'll be pleased to see how your ranking improves and, perhaps even more importantly, you'll be happy to know that you've just improved your readers experience. And in the end, there's nothing more important than happy readers, is there?
Dave Taylor has been blogging since the tools first appeared online. This is his 31st year online. His primary blog is the popular Ask Dave Taylor! offering up free tech support on a wide variety of topics including blogging and SEO. You can find him on all the major social networks through DaveTaylorOnline.com.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
Getting Started with Webmaster Tools: Fixing 404 Errors
Переслать - Don't Let Your Blog Get Caught with its Pants Down
This guest post is by Joseph of Blog Tweaks.
I know a guy who went on a backpacking trip in Ghana.
One leg of his trip stood out—a five hour bus ride from Kumasi to Cape Coast. This particular ride started at 4:30 a.m.
Yes, that's crazy early, but it wasn't the worst part of the trip.
The worst part was the rolling bowel cramps that started from mile one and wouldn't go away. They came back every ten minutes. One minute on, nine minutes off.
The blackness of the West African countryside lulled most of the passengers to sleep as the bus continued down the pock marked semblance of a highway, but not so for this guy. He could think of only one thing—this bus had to stop.
But where?
Looking out the window, all he saw were the pale outlines of mud huts and thatched roofs. Where would the bus stop? Did they have rest stops here?
Regardless, the bus had to stop. And it had to stop now.
Suddenly, out of the morning blackness, a small town appeared. As the bus rolled to a stop at an, my friend made his way to the front of the bus, explained the situation to the driver, and asked if he could get off to take care of the pain.
The driver obliged, pointing helpfully to the backside of a shed that was off the road and in front of a village home. It would have to do. It was the only option.
He quickly made his way behind the structure and … went about his business. Yes, out in the open, in the pre-dawn still of a beautiful African morning.
And then it happened.
As he was awkwardly crouched trying to get through the most surreal bathroom break of his life, the door of the home 25 feet directly in front of him opened. Out stepped a local Ghanaian who found himself face to face with my friend.
What a sight to behold—this man woke up in the home he had lived in for who knows how long, walked outside expecting to see the sunrise, and instead finds a white guy fifteen feet away with his pants around his ankles squatting down behind his shed.
As my friend helplessly looked up, the owner of the house began to yell, "What are you doing! What are you doing!"
How do you respond?
All he could say was, "My bad." Over and over again.
As the owner continued to yell in disbelief, the helpless traveller finally finished, buttoned up, mumbled "my bad" a couple more times, and then quickly walked back to the bus which couldn't leave fast enough.
To this day, I'm not sure who has the better story. The one I'm telling here or the one told in the village later that day: "It was 5:30 a.m., and there was an obroni (white man) squatting behind my shed saying, 'my bad'…" He's probably still getting mileage from the tale.
Hopefully you've been entertained by this story, but what does it have to do with blogging?
The answer is everything.
You don't ever want your blog to get caught with its pants down.
Here's what I mean.
The blogging equivalent
For your blog to get caught with its pants down is for you to not be ready for traffic before it arrives.
If Darren Rowse at ProBlogger tweeted one of your posts today, would your blog be ready? Is there enough quality content on your site to convert visitors into subscribers? Does your site have a professional design, or does it look more like kindergartner art than a digital storefront? Do you have any way to make money from the traffic?
If not, you might get caught with your pants down.
The day my blog was caught
It happened to my first blog—www.JosephWesley.Wordpress.com.
It was an ordinary Saturday morning, and as I finished reading an interview with Warren Buffett in Forbes magazine, I typed up the most salient quotes, which I then published as a post titled "7 Priceless Business Quotes from Warren Buffett.”
Little did I know what would happen next.
I expected this post to be the same as all of my other posts, meaning nobody would notice, so I left the house and went about my ordinary day.
Unknown to me, my blog was not having an ordinary day. Somehow, Mark Cuban, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks, found and tweeted the post. Let me repeat—Mark Cuban, the billionaire owner of the NBA champion Dallas Mavericks, read and tweeted the post.
He also has 564,454 followers.
I had no idea.
Later that night, I came home and checked the stats. Then I did a double take. I thought my stat counter was broken.
There had been 3,000 visitors to a WordPress.com blog that I started three months earlier as an experiment. Until that time, the most visitors I'd in one day was twenty.
I had no idea what had happened, so I searched until I discovered Mr. Cuban's tweet.
The end result was 7,000 people reading the post over the next month with over 400 re-tweeting. It's still my most popular post of all time.
So what was the problem? Why wasn't this an awesome day? How did my blog get caught with its pants down?
The problem was this—I wasn't ready. I was as helpless the guy behind the shed.
Of the 7,000 people that visited, somewhere around ten subscribed by e-mail. I also didn't have any kind of service or advertising, so there was no way to make money.
Yes, it was the biggest day in my blogging experience, but, unfortunately, I didn't capitalize on the traffic.
What do do about it
So how do you get ready for traffic like that? How do you make sure your blog doesn't get caught with its pants down?
Here's how:
- Write quality content: If you write high quality content, people are more likely to subscribe for future posts. Nobody wants average posts taking up space in their inbox.
- Pick one topic: Focusing on one topic will convert more readers into subscribers. A marketing guy won't subscribe to a blog about ten different topics; he'll subscribe to a blog about marketing. Write for one topic and you'll automatically convince more readers to subscribe.
- Focus on subscribers: There are a lot of things you can focus on for conversions, but until you have a better reason not to focus on subscribers, don't. Those are the people that will consistently come back to read and will eventually buy. Make subscribing insanely easy by putting the opt-in box at the top of the sidebar. Don't make people search for the subscription box underneath calendar and archive. Do yourself a favor: put it at the top.
- Improve your design: Appearance matters. In a job interview, you dress for success; with a blog, you design for it. The good news is that premium themes from sites like Studiopress make getting a great design easy and affordable. It's the best blog investment you'll ever make.
- Make an offer: One of the best ways to make money from a blog is to offer something for sale. If you don't give visitors something to purchase, you have zero chance of making a sale. People can't buy what you don't offer to sell them. So what you can offer to sell your blog readers? An ebook? Consulting? Design services? Whatever you decide, make sure to make a clear offer on your site. (An example of this can be seen on the "Hire Me” page at Blog Tweaks.)
So there you have it: a story from Ghana, reasons why you don't want your blog to get caught with its pants down, and five ways to get prepared so it won't happen to you.
What do you think? Are you ready to cinch up your blog so it doesn't get caught with its pants down?
Joseph has a marketing degree from UT Austin. He's currently looking for a select number of companies interested in hiring a paid blogger to write their posts. If you're interested, visit Blog Tweaks to find out more.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
Don't Let Your Blog Get Caught with its Pants Down
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