marți, 17 ianuarie 2012

Damn Cool Pics

Damn Cool Pics


Apocalypse Later, Surf Now

Posted: 17 Jan 2012 05:07 PM PST



What better way to honor the movie "Apocalypse Now". YouTuber keef70 shot the video on a GoPro camera and created the video effects on his iMac. The video is set to the song The Whales by The Mermen, from their 1989 album Krill Slippin'.


Via: laughingsquid


Skiing Witches Race in Belalp, Switzerland

Posted: 17 Jan 2012 04:12 PM PST

Participants ski in the 30th edition of the Belalp Witches Ski Race on January 14, 2012 in Belalp, Switzerland. The race is inspired by a legend dating back to the middle ages, of a witch who tormented villagers in the area until she was burnt to death.

The downhill at Belalp is a fun event called "Hexenabfahrt" (downhill of the witches) and many of the 1,500 participants race down the 12km slope long in colorful costumes.


































































Photos by Harold Cunningham/Getty Images Via Huffingtonpost


Movies from an Alternate Universe

Posted: 17 Jan 2012 03:28 PM PST

What if the movies of today were made in an earlier era? Who would star? Who would direct? What would the poster look like? Artist Peter Stults ran with that idea and came up with some wonderfully creative and thoughtful posters based on recent movies. How about a black and white version of The Hangover, recast with members of the Rat Pack? Or Trainspotting as a new wave masterpiece by Jean-Luc Godard.






























Social Savvy Critters [Infographic]

Posted: 17 Jan 2012 03:20 PM PST



Pet lovers around the world are bringing social media into their pets lives, not just their own. While some are creating facebook pages for the pets, others are going to social media sites for pets only. So, if you already have a pet, or are getting ready to buy a dog, take a look at the infographic below and learn how you can make your pet a social savvy one!

More Infographics.

Click on Image to Enlarge.

Source: ebayclassifieds


Prank 2012 – How To Destroy A Car with Giant Axe

Posted: 16 Jan 2012 10:18 PM PST



Revenge is bitter sweet - this Aussie guy plays one epic prank on his friend where he chops his friends car with a giant axe. His theory is simple — bigger is better. Much, much bigger.


Inside Facebook's Brand New Headquarters

Posted: 16 Jan 2012 09:14 PM PST

On Monday, Facebook is all moved in to its new headquarter complex in Menlo Park, the former home of Sun Microsystems. Facebook's 57-acre campus currently houses some 2,000 employees, but has the potential to comfortably accommodate nearly 9,000 workers as the company looks to grow rapidly in the coming years.

The company has come a long way from Mark Zuckerberg's Harvard dorm room in 2004, having taken up roots in Palo Alto and now moving to their new 1601 Willow Road address.










































Source: reuters


iPoo Toilet: Toilet For True Apple Fans

Posted: 16 Jan 2012 08:38 PM PST

Designed by Serbian freelance digital artist Milos Paripovic, the iPoo Toilet is a prestigious designer toilet.

In his own words:

Unlike some Apple products, this toilet fully supports Flush. This toilet has exactly the same function as any other toilet and costs only twice as much for the same performance; but you will agree it is all about style and taste, and you will look a lot cooler in your friends' eyes when you say you use the iPoo Toilet..









21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic (Updated 2012)

21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic (Updated 2012)


21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic (Updated 2012)

Posted: 16 Jan 2012 05:48 PM PST

Posted by randfish

It's easy to build a blog, but hard to build a successful blog with significant traffic. Over the years, we've grown the Moz blog to nearly a million visits each month and helped lots of other blogs, too. I launched a personal blog late last year and was amazed to see how quickly it gained thousands of visits to each post. There's an art to increasing a blog's traffic, and given that we seem to have stumbled on some of that knowledge, I felt it compulsory to give back by sharing what we've observed.

NOTE: This post replaces a popular one I wrote on the same topic in 2007. This post is intended to be useful to all forms of bloggers - independent folks, those seeking to monetize, and marketing professionals working an in-house blog from tiny startups to huge companies. Not all of the tactics will work for everyone, but at least some of these should be applicable and useful.

#1 - Target Your Content to an Audience Likely to Share

When strategizing about who you're writing for, consider that audience's ability to help spread the word. Some readers will naturally be more or less active in evangelizing the work you do, but particular communities, topics, writing styles and content types regularly play better than others on the web. For example, great infographics that strike a chord (like this one), beautiful videos that tell a story (like this one) and remarkable collections of facts that challenge common assumptions (like this one) are all targeted at audiences likely to share (geeks with facial hair, those interested in weight loss and those with political thoughts about macroeconomics respectively).

A Blog's Target Audience

If you can identify groups that have high concentrations of the blue and orange circles in the diagram above, you dramatically improve the chances of reaching larger audiences and growing your traffic numbers. Targeting blog content at less-share-likely groups may not be a terrible decision (particularly if that's where you passion or your target audience lies), but it will decrease the propensity for your blog's work to spread like wildfire across the web.

#2 - Participate in the Communities Where Your Audience Already Gathers

Advertisers on Madison Avenue have spent billions researching and determining where consumers with various characteristics gather and what they spend their time doing so they can better target their messages. They do it because reaching a group of 65+ year old women with commercials for extreme sports equipment is known to be a waste of money, while reaching an 18-30 year old male demographic that attends rock-climbing gyms is likely to have a much higher ROI.

Thankfully, you don't need to spend a dime to figure out where a large portion of your audience can be found on the web. In fact, you probably already know a few blogs, forums, websites and social media communities where discussions and content are being posted on your topic (and if you don't a Google search will take you much of the way). From that list, you can do some easy expansion using a web-based tool like DoubleClick's Ad Planner:

Sites Also Visited via DoubleClick

Once you've determined the communities where your soon-to-be-readers gather, you can start participating. Create an account, read what others have written and don't jump in the conversation until you've got a good feel for what's appropriate and what's not. I've written a post here about rules for comment marketing, and all of them apply. Be a good web citizen and you'll be rewarded with traffic, trust and fans. Link-drop, spam or troll and you'll get a quick boot, or worse, a reputation as a blogger no one wants to associate with.

#3 - Make Your Blog's Content SEO-Friendly

Search engines are a massive opportunity for traffic, yet many bloggers ignore this channel for a variety of reasons that usually have more to do with fear and misunderstanding than true problems. As I've written before, "SEO, when done right, should never interfere with great writing." In 2011, Google received over 3 billion daily searches from around the world, and that number is only growing:

Daily Google Searches 2004-2011
sources: Comscore + Google

Taking advantage of this massive traffic opportunity is of tremendous value to bloggers, who often find that much of the business side of blogging, from inquiries for advertising to guest posting opportunities to press and discovery by major media entities comes via search.

SEO for blogs is both simple and easy to set up, particularly if you're using an SEO-friendly platform like Wordpress, Drupal or Joomla. For more information on how to execute on great SEO for blogs, check out the following resources:

Don't let bad press or poor experiences with spammers (spam is not SEO) taint the amazing power and valuable contributions SEO can make to your blog's traffic and overall success. 20% of the effort and tactics to make your content optimized for search engines will yield 80% of the value possible; embrace it and thousands of visitors seeking exactly what you've posted will be the reward.

#4 - Use Twitter, Facebook and Google+ to Share Your Posts & Find New Connections

Twitter just topped 465 million registered accounts. Facebook has over 850 million active users. Google+ has nearly 100 million. LinkedIn is over 130 million. Together, these networks are attracting vast amounts of time and interest from Internet users around the world, and those that participate on these services fit into the "content distributors" description above, meaning they're likely to help spread the word about your blog.

Leveraging these networks to attract traffic requires patience, study, attention to changes by the social sites and consideration in what content to share and how to do it. My advice is to use the following process:

  • If you haven't already, register a personal account and a brand account at each of the following - Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn (those links will take you directly to the registration pages for brand pages). For example, my friend Dharmesh has a personal account for Twitter and a brand account for OnStartups (one of his blog projects). He also maintains brand pages on Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+.
  • Fill out each of those profiles to the fullest possible extent - use photos, write compelling descriptions and make each one as useful and credible as possible. Research shows that profiles with more information have a significant correlation with more successful accounts (and there's a lot of common sense here, too, given that spammy profiles frequently feature little to no profile work).
  • Connect with users on those sites with whom you already share a personal or professional relationships, and start following industry luminaries, influencers and connectors. Services like FollowerWonk and FindPeopleonPlus can be incredible for this:

Followerwonk Search for "Seattle Chef"

  • Start sharing content - your own blog posts, those of peers in your industry who've impressed you and anything that you feel has a chance to go "viral" and earn sharing from others.
  • Interact with the community - use hash tags, searches and those you follow to find interesting conversations and content and jump in! Social networks are amazing environment for building a brand, familiarizing yourself with a topic and the people around it, and earning the trust of others through high quality, authentic participation and sharing

If you consistently employ a strategy of participation, share great stuff and make a positive, memorable impression on those who see your interactions on these sites, your followers and fans will grow and your ability to drive traffic back to your blog by sharing content will be tremendous. For many bloggers, social media is the single largest source of traffic, particularly in the early months after launch, when SEO is a less consistent driver.

#5 - Install Analytics and Pay Attention to the Results

At the very least, I'd recommend most bloggers install Google Analytics (which is free), and watch to see where visits originate, which sources drive quality traffic and what others might be saying about you and your content when they link over. If you want to get more advanced, check out this post on 18 Steps to Successful Metrics and Marketing.

Here's a screenshot from the analytics of my wife's travel blog, the Everywhereist:

Traffic Sources to Everywhereist from Google Analytics

As you can see, there's all sorts of great insights to be gleaned by looking at where visits originate, analyzing how they were earned and trying to repeat the successes, focus on the high quality and high traffic sources and put less effort into marketing paths that may not be effective. In this example, it's pretty clear that Facebook and Twitter are both excellent channels. StumbleUpon sends a lot of traffic, but they don't stay very long (averaging only 36 seconds vs. the general average of 4 minutes!).

Employing analytics is critical to knowing where you're succeeding, and where you have more opportunity. Don't ignore it, or you'll be doomed to never learn from mistakes or execute on potential.

#6 - Add Graphics, Photos and Illustrations (with link-back licensing)

If you're someone who can produce graphics, take photos, illustrate or even just create funny doodles in MS Paint, you should leverage that talent on your blog. By uploading and hosting images (or using a third-party service like Flickr to embed your images with licensing requirements on that site), you create another traffic source for yourself via Image Search, and often massively improve the engagement and enjoyment of your visitors.

When using images, I highly recommend creating a way for others to use them on their own sites legally and with permission, but in such a way that benefits you as the content creator. For example, you could have a consistent notice under your images indicating that re-using is fine, but that those who do should link back to this post. You can also post that as a sidebar link, include it in your terms of use, or note it however you think will get the most adoption.

Some people will use your images without linking back, which sucks. However, you can find them by employing the Image Search function of "similar images," shown below:

Google's "Visually Similar" Search

Clicking the "similar" link on any given image will show you other images that Google thinks look alike, which can often uncover new sources of traffic. Just reach out and ask if you can get a link, nicely. Much of the time, you'll not only get your link, but make a valuable contact or new friend, too!

#7 - Conduct Keyword Research While Writing Your Posts

Not surprisingly, a big part of showing up in search engines is targeting the terms and phrases your audience are actually typing into a search engine. It's hard to know what these words will be unless you do some research, and luckily, there's a free tool from Google to help called the AdWords Keyword Tool.

Type some words at the top, hit search and AdWords will show you phrases that match the intent and/or terms you've employed. There's lots to play around with here, but watch out in particular for the "match types" options I've highlighted below:

Google AdWords Tool

When you choose "exact match" AdWords will show you only the quantity of searches estimated for that precise phrase. If you use broad match, they'll include any search phrases that use related/similar words in a pattern they think could have overlap with your keyword intent (which can get pretty darn broad). "Phrase match" will give you only those phrases that include the word or words in your search - still fairly wide-ranging, but between "exact" and "broad."

When you're writing a blog post, keyword research is best utilized for the title and headline of the post. For example, if I wanted to write a post here on Moz about how to generate good ideas for bloggers, I might craft something that uses the phrase "blog post ideas" or "blogging ideas" near the front of my title and headline, as in "Blog Post Ideas for When You're Truly Stuck," or "Blogging Ideas that Will Help You Clear Writer's Block."

Optimizing a post to target a specific keyword isn't nearly as hard as it sounds. 80% of the value comes from merely using the phrase effectively in the title of the blog post, and writing high quality content about the subject. If you're interested in more, read Perfecting Keyword Targeting and On-Page Optimization (a slightly older resource, but just as relevant today as when it was written).

#8 - Frequently Reference Your Own Posts and Those of Others

The web was not made for static, text-only content! Readers appreciate links, as do other bloggers, site owners and even search engines. When you reference your own material in-context and in a way that's not manipulative (watch out for over-optimizing by linking to a category, post or page every time a phrase is used - this is almost certainly discounted by search engines and looks terrible to those who want to read your posts), you potentially draw visitors to your other content AND give search engines a nice signal about those previous posts.

Perhaps even more valuable is referencing the content of others. The biblical expression "give and ye shall receive," perfectly applies on the web. Other site owners will often receive Google Alerts or look through their incoming referrers (as I showed above in tip #5) to see who's talking about them and what they're saying. Linking out is a direct line to earning links, social mentions, friendly emails and new relationships with those you reference. In its early days, this tactic was one of the best ways we earned recognition and traffic with the SEOmoz blog and the power continues to this day.

#9 - Participate in Social Sharing Communities Like Reddit + StumbleUpon

The major social networking sites aren't alone in their power to send traffic to a blog. Social community sites like Reddit (which now receives more than 2 billion! with a "B"! views each month), StumbleUpon, Pinterest, Tumblr, Care2 (for nonprofits and causes), GoodReads (books), Ravelry (knitting), Newsvine (news/politics) and many, many more (Wikipedia maintains a decent, though not comprehensive list here).

Each of these sites have different rules, formats and ways of participating and sharing content. As with participation in blog or forum communities described above in tactic #2, you need to add value to these communities to see value back. Simply drive-by spamming or leaving your link won't get you very far, and could even cause a backlash. Instead, learn the ropes, engage authentically and you'll find that fans, links and traffic can develop.

These communities are also excellent sources of inspiration for posts on your blog. By observing what performs well and earns recognition, you can tailor your content to meet those guidelines and reap the rewards in visits and awareness. My top recommendation for most bloggers is to at least check whether there's an appropriate subreddit in which you should be participating. Subreddits and their search function can help with that.

#10 - Guest Blog (and Accept the Guest Posts of Others)

When you're first starting out, it can be tough to convince other bloggers to allow you to post on their sites OR have an audience large enough to inspire others to want to contribute to your site. This is when friends and professional connections are critical. When you don't have a compelling marketing message, leverage your relationships - find the folks who know you, like you and trust you and ask those who have blog to let you take a shot at authoring something, then ask them to return the favor.

Guest blogging is a fantastic way to spread your brand to new folks who've never seen your work before, and it can be useful in earning early links and references back to your site, which will drive direct traffic and help your search rankings (diverse, external links are a key part of how search engines rank sites and pages). Several recommendations for those who engage in guest blogging:

  • Find sites that have a relevant audience - it sucks to pour your time into writing a post, only to see it fizzle because the readers weren't interested. Spend a bit more time researching the posts that succeed on your target site, the makeup of the audience, what types of comments they leave and you'll earn a much higher return with each post.
  • Don't be discouraged if you ask and get a "no" or a "no response." As your profile grows in your niche, you'll have more opportunities, requests and an easier time getting a "yes," so don't take early rejections too hard and watch out - in many marketing practices, persistence pays, but pestering a blogger to write for them is not one of these (and may get your email address permanently banned from their inbox).
  • When pitching your guest post make it as easy as possible for the other party. When requesting to post, have a phenomenal piece of writing all set to publish that's never been shared before and give them the ability to read it. These requests get far more "yes" replies than asking for the chance to write with no evidence of what you'll contribute. At the very least, make an outline and write a title + snippet.
  • Likewise, when requesting a contribution, especially from someone with a significant industry profile, asking for a very specific piece of writing is much easier than getting them to write an entire piece from scratch of their own design. You should also present statistics that highlight the value of posting on your site - traffic data, social followers, RSS subscribers, etc. can all be very persuasive to a skeptical writer.

A great tool for frequent guest bloggers is Ann Smarty's MyBlogGuest, which offers the ability to connect writers with those seeking guest contributions (and the reverse).

MyBlogGuest

Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ are also great places to find guest blogging opportunities. In particular, check out the profiles of those you're connected with to see if they run blogs of their own that might be a good fit. Google's Blog Search function and Google Reader's Search are also solid tools for discovery.

#11 - Incorporate Great Design Into Your Site

The power of beautiful, usable, professional design can't be overstated. When readers look at a blog, the first thing they judge is how it "feels" from a design and UX perspective. Sites that use default templates or have horrifying, 1990's design will receive less trust, a lower time-on-page, fewer pages per visit and a lower likelihood of being shared. Those that feature stunning design that clearly indicates quality work will experience the reverse - and reap amazing benefits.

Blog Design Inspiration
These threads - 1, 2, 3 and 4 - feature some remarkable blog designs for inspiration

If you're looking for a designer to help upgrade the quality of your blog, there's a few resources I recommend:

  • Dribbble - great for finding high quality professional designers
  • Forrst - another excellent design profile community
  • Behance - featuring galleries from a wide range of visual professionals
  • Sortfolio - an awesome tool to ID designers by region, skill and budget
  • 99 Designs - a controversial site that provides designs on spec via contests (I have mixed feelings on this one, but many people find it useful, particularly for budget-conscious projects)

This is one area where budgeting a couple thousand dollars (if you can afford it) or even a few hundred (if you're low on cash) can make a big difference in the traffic, sharing and viral-impact of every post you write.

#12 - Interact on Other Blogs' Comments

As bloggers, we see a lot of comments. Many are spam, only a few add real value, and even fewer are truly fascinating and remarkable. If you can be in this final category consistently, in ways that make a blogger sit up and think "man, I wish that person commented here more often!" you can achieve great things for your own site's visibility through participation in the comments of other blogs.

Combine the tools presented in #10 (particularly Google Reader/Blog Search) and #4 (especially FollowerWonk) for discovery. The feed subscriber counts in Google Reader can be particularly helpful for identifying good blogs for participation. Then apply the principles covered in this post on comment marketing.

Google Reader Subscriber Counts

Do be conscious of the name you use when commenting and the URL(s) you point back to. Consistency matters, particularly on naming, and linking to internal pages or using a name that's clearly made for keyword-spamming rather than true conversation will kill your efforts before they begin.

#13 - Participate in Q+A Sites

Every day, thousands of people ask questions on the web. Popular services like Yahoo! Answers, Answers.com, Quora, StackExchange, Formspring and more serve those hungry for information whose web searches couldn't track down the responses they needed.

The best strategy I've seen for engaging on Q+A sites isn't to answer every question that comes along, but rather, to strategically provide high value to a Q+A community by engaging in those places where:

  • The question quality is high, and responses thus far have been thin
  • The question receives high visibility (either by ranking well for search queries, being featured on the site or getting social traffic/referrals). Most of the Q+A sites will show some stats around the traffic of a question
  • The question is something you can answer in a way that provides remarkable value to anyone who's curious and drops by

I also find great value in answering a few questions in-depth by producing an actual blog post to tackle them, then linking back. This is also a way I personally find blog post topics - if people are interested in the answer on a Q+A site, chances are good that lots of folks would want to read it on my blog, too!

Just be authentic in your answer, particularly if you're linking. If you'd like to see some examples, I answer a lot of questions at Quora, frequently include relevant links, but am rarely accused of spamming or link dropping because it's clearly about providing relevant value, not just getting a link for SEO (links on most user-contributed sites are "nofollow" anyway, meaning they shouldn't pass search-engine value). There's a dangerous line to walk here, but if you do so with tact and candor, you can earn a great audience from your participation.

#14 - Enable Subscriptions via Feed + Email (and track them!)

If someone drops by your site, has a good experience and thinks "I should come back here and check this out again when they have more posts," chances are pretty high (I'd estimate 90%+) that you'll never see them again. That sucks! It shouldn't be the case, but we have busy lives and the Internet's filled with animated gifs of cats.

In order to pull back some of these would-be fans, I highly recommend creating an RSS feed using Feedburner and putting visible buttons on the sidebar, top or bottom of your blog posts encouraging those who enjoy your content to sign up (either via feed, or via email, both of which are popular options).

RSS Feeds with Feedburner

If you're using Wordpress, there's some easy plugins for this, too.

Once you've set things up, visit every few weeks and check on your subscribers - are they clicking on posts? If so, which ones? Learning what plays well for those who subscribe to your content can help make you a better blogger, and earn more visits from RSS, too.

#15 - Attend and Host Events

Despite the immense power of the web to connect us all regardless of geography, in-person meetings are still remarkably useful for bloggers seeking to grow their traffic and influence. The people you meet and connect with in real-world settings are far more likely to naturally lead to discussions about your blog and ways you can help each other. This yields guest posts, links, tweets, shares, blogroll inclusion and general business development like nothing else.

Lanyrd Suggested Events

I'm a big advocate of Lanyrd, an event directory service that connects with your social networks to see who among your contacts will be at which events in which geographies. This can be phenomenally useful for identifying which meetups, conferences or gatherings are worth attending (and who you can carpool with).

The founder of Lanyrd also contributed this great answer on Quora about other search engines/directories for events (which makes me like them even more).

#16 - Use Your Email Connections (and Signature) to Promote Your Blog

As a blogger, you're likely to be sending a lot of email out to others who use the web and have the power to help spread your work. Make sure you're not ignoring email as a channel, one-to-one though it may be. When given an opportunity in a conversation that's relevant, feel free to bring up your blog, a specific post or a topic you've written about. I find myself using blogging as a way to scalably answer questions - if I receive the same question many times, I'll try to make a blog post that answers it so I can simply link to that in the future.

Email Footer Link

I also like to use my email signature to promote the content I share online. If I was really sharp, I'd do link tracking using a service like Bit.ly so I could see how many clicks email footers really earn. I suspect it's not high, but it's also not 0.

#17 - Survey Your Readers

Web surveys are easy to run and often produce high engagement and great topics for conversation. If there's a subject or discussion that's particularly contested, or where you suspect showing the distribution of beliefs, usage or opinions can be revealing, check out a tool like SurveyMonkey (they have a small free version) or PollDaddy. Google Docs also offers a survey tool that's totally free, but not yet great in my view.

#18 - Add Value to a Popular Conversation

Numerous niches in the blogosphere have a few "big sites" where key issues arise, get discussed and spawn conversations on other blogs and sites. Getting into the fray can be a great way to present your point-of-view, earn attention from those interested in the discussion and potentially get links and traffic from the industry leaders as part of the process.

You can see me trying this out with Fred Wilson's AVC blog last year (an incredibly popular and well-respected blog in the VC world). Fred wrote a post about Marketing that I disagreed with strongly and publicly and a day later, he wrote a follow-up where he included a graphic I made AND a link to my post.

If you're seeking sources to find these "popular conversations," Alltop, Topsy, Techmeme (in the tech world) and their sister sites MediaGazer, Memeorandum and WeSmirch, as well as PopURLs can all be useful.

#19 - Aggregate the Best of Your Niche

Bloggers, publishers and site owners of every variety in the web world love and hate to be compared and ranked against one another. It incites endless intrigue, discussion, methodology arguments and competitive behavior - but, it's amazing for earning attention. When a blogger publishes a list of "the best X" or "the top X" in their field, most everyone who's ranked highly praises the list, shares it and links to it. Here's an example from the world of marketing itself:

AdAge Power 150

That's a screenshot of the AdAge Power 150, a list that's been maintained for years in the marketing world and receives an endless amount of discussion by those listed (and not listed). For example, why is SEOmoz's Twitter score only a "13" when we have so many more followers, interactions and retweets than many of those with higher scores? Who knows. But I know it's good for AdAge. :-)

Now, obviously, I would encourage anyone building something like this to be as transparent, accurate and authentic as possible. A high quality resource that lists a "best and brightest" in your niche - be they blogs, Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, individual posts, people, conferences or whatever else you can think to rank - is an excellent piece of content for earning traffic and becoming a known quantity in your field.

Oh, and once you do produce it - make sure to let those featured know they've been listed. Tweeting at them with a link is a good way to do this, but if you have email addresses, by all means, reach out. It can often be the start of a great relationship!

#20 - Connect Your Web Profiles and Content to Your Blog

Many of you likely have profiles on services like YouTube, Slideshare, Yahoo!, DeviantArt and dozens of other social and Web 1.0 sites. You might be uploading content to Flickr, to Facebook, to Picasa or even something more esoteric like Prezi. Whatever you're producing on the web and wherever you're doing it, tie it back to your blog.

Including your blog's link on your actual profile pages is among the most obvious, but it's also incredibly valuable. On any service where interaction takes place, those interested in who you are and what you have to share will follow those links, and if they lead back to your blog, they become opportunities for capturing a loyal visitor or earning a share (or both!). But don't just do this with profiles - do it with content, too! If you've created a video for YouTube, make your blog's URL appear at the start or end of the video. Include it in the description of the video and on the uploading profile's page. If you're sharing photos on any of the dozens of photo services, use a watermark or even just some text with your domain name so interested users can find you.

If you're having trouble finding and updating all those old profiles (or figuring out where you might want to create/share some new ones), KnowEm is a great tool for discovering your own profiles (by searching for your name or pseudonyms you've used) and claiming profiles on sites you may not yet have participated in.

I'd also strongly recommend leveraging Google's relatively new protocol for rel=author. AJ Kohn wrote a great post on how to set it up here, and Yoast has another good one on building it into Wordpress sites. The benefit for bloggers who do build large enough audiences to gain Google's trust is earning your profile photo next to all the content you author - a powerful markup advantage that likely drives extra clicks from the search results and creates great, memorable branding, too.

#21 - Uncover the Links of Your Fellow Bloggers (and Nab 'em!)

If other blogs in your niche have earned references from sites around the web, there's a decent chance that they'll link to you as well. Conducting competitive link research can also show you what content from your competition has performed well and the strategies they may be using to market their work. To uncover these links, you'll need to use some tools.

OpenSiteExplorer is my favorite, but I'm biased (it's made by Moz). However, it is free to use - if you create a registered account here, you can get unlimited use of the tool showing up to 1,000 links per page or site in perpetuity.

OpenSiteExplorer from Moz

There are other good tools for link research as well, including Blekko, Majestic, Ahrefs and, I've heard that in the near-future, SearchMetrics.

Finding a link is great, but it's through the exhaustive research of looking through dozens or hundreds that you can identify patterns and strategies. You're also likely to find a lot of guest blogging opportunities and other chances for outreach. If you maintain a great persona and brand in your niche, your ability to earn these will rise dramatically.

Bonus #22 - Be Consistent and Don't Give Up

If there's one piece of advice I wish I could share with every blogger, it's this:

Why Bloggers Give Up Traffic Graph

The above image comes from Everywhereist's analytics. Geraldine could have given up 18 months into her daily blogging. After all, she was putting in 3-5 hours each day writing content, taking photos, visiting sites, coming up with topics, trying to guest blog and grow her Twitter followers and never doing any SEO (don't ask, it's a running joke between us). And then, almost two years after her blog began, and more than 500 posts in, things finally got going. She got some nice guest blogging gigs, had some posts of hers go "hot" in the social sphere, earned mentions on some bigger sites, then got really big press from Time's Best Blogs of 2011.

I'd guess there's hundreds of new bloggers on the web each day who have all the opportunity Geraldine had, but after months (maybe only weeks) of slogging away, they give up.

When I started the SEOmoz blog in 2004, I had some advantages (mostly a good deal of marketing and SEO knowledge), but it was nearly 2 years before the blog could be called anything like a success. Earning traffic isn't rocket science, but it does take time, perseverance and consistency. Don't give up. Stick to your schedule. Remember that everyone has a few posts that suck, and it's only by writing and publishing those sucky posts that you get into the habit necessary to eventually transform your blog into something remarkable.

Good luck and good blogging from all of us at Moz!


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Why Every Marketer Now Needs a Google+ Strategy

Posted: 16 Jan 2012 01:16 AM PST

Posted by randfish

Last week, Google rolled out "Search Plus Your World," an update to Google's universally popular search engine that biases logged-in users to receive socially shared content and markup in the results. Danny Sullivan wrote two excellent must-read pieces on the topic - Google's Results Get More Personal and Real-Life Examples of How "Search Plus" Pushes Google+ Over Relevancy. Thank God for Danny. If it wasn't for his tireless coverage, I'd feel obligated to spend hours writing those pieces myself (and they probably wouldn't be as good).

SEOmoz received a lot of requests for coverage, but typically we don't like to rush into writing about a new service/technology/change until we've got at least a few days of playing with it, watching the tech news cycles spin and evaluating how it might change practices for inbound marketers. To be honest, we still don't really know - our own accounts sometime get access to SPYW, and other times it seems to go missing (right now, for example, my Gmail account, which was showing SPYW results all last week, is suddenly back to regular, non-personalized Google). However, we felt that this was a momentous enough to shift to warrant a video on the changes and some discussion. 

 

It's my opinion that if SPYW continues to roll out to all logged-in Google users and Google stays as aggressive as it's been in the last 10 days with pushing Google+ for even logged-out users, the service will become a necessity for search and social marketers. In 2009 and 2010, Google's integration with Twitter was remarkable - helping content get indexed in seconds, earning featured spots for logged-in users who were connected to each other on Twitter and showing up in all sorts of specially-marked-up results. Google's taken that much, much further with SPYW, and while I'm no particular fan of using your market power to force users onto a platform they may not want, I'm also a realist. When I see this:

SEO Logged Out Search with Google SPYW Results

I know that as a marketer, there's missed opportunity if I'm ignoring Google+ (the search above is done totally logged-out).

BTW - if you liked the video above and Whiteboard Fridays in general, check out our SEOmoz Google+ page which features a few more and will continue to host some unique, interesting content that doesn't necessarily make it to the blog. Like everyone, we're still experimenting with G+, and suggestions are welcome!

 SEOmoz on Google+

Look forward to your thoughts around the necessity of Google+ (and watch this space as we plan on having some more tips + tactics on that front soon).

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to a special edition of Whiteboard+. Today we're actually talking a little bit meta about Google+and Google Search Plus Your World, which is Google's new effort to take their social network, Google+, and involve it more in exceedingly intricate ways with your search results and with everyone's search results.

I want to talk a little bit about what this means and why, in my opinion, every web marketer needs a Google+ strategy for their site, for their content. If you don't, I think you're going to be missing out very, very quickly. I think Google has really forced marketers' hands in this way, businesses in particular that have content on the Web. I'll show you what I mean by this.

So I've got some reasons why I believe this. Number one, Google+ is in the search results like you have never seen before. Let me illustrate for you really briefly with some search results that I've drawn up here. I even made the little icon with my finger. So, when I perform a search, like "Rand Fishkin," and if you are connected to me on Google+, you'll actually see results remarkably similar to this where my Google+ profile outranks all my other content. There was a great rant from someone whom I'm not usually a big fan of because of his denial of the power of SEO, but Jason Calacanis actually had a nice rant on Google+ itself where he noted that his Google+ profile was outranking all the other content - his blog, his Twitter profile. My wife noticed the same thing for her Everwhereist account for her travel blog, how essentially Google+ had taken over the number one spot for a lot of brand names and personal names, obviously, with the intent of hoping that people will contribute more to Google+, that they'll keep their profiles updated because if you don't, it looks kind of bad.

So what you see here is my Google profile. You'll actually see a photo of me. You see that I'm in Seattle, Washington. It's pulling some metadata in here, and then they'll give you some links to other places where I am on the Web that I've chosen for my Google+ profile. So obviously, this is almost like having to claim a LinkedIn profile so that people can find me on LinkedIn or a Facebook profile so that people can find me on Facebook. Google is really making this essential, and the way that they're doing it is through Google+.

Now it's not just personal brand names and personal profiles. They do this for some pretty big sites too. In fact, you'll also see a ton of other Google+ stuff inside the search results. I'll show you what I mean here. So you can see obviously the +1, but they will often have a count of +1's that come from that. They'll also have people who in your network have +1'd or shared a particular result, and those are essentially almost rich snippets, rich data that you can't get any other way. There is no other way to get people in your network, whose profiles are connected. It's not like they're going to show you people who liked SEOmoz's Facebook page or people who follow SEOmoz on Twitter who you also follow. This, Google+ has become one of the only ways to get this social proof that you used to be able to get through all sorts of Google social search.

Now, this being said, Matt Cutts did point out - Matt Cutts is one of the search quality engineers at Google, runs the web spam team there - he did point out that for a few other networks, Flikr, Quora, FriendFeed, which was bought by Facebook, and a couple of others sometimes those results can be in here as well. It's extremely rare. You can find it, but it's tough to see, and Google+ is clearly the best and easiest way to get into this type of markup, into these kinds of results. And remember this stuff, not only is it appearing, it's pushes results higher.

So for example, if I am searching for something and let's say Kenny Martin from SEOmoz has shared something on Google+ or he's +1'd it, I am likely to see that higher in my search results because Kenny is in one of my circles on Google+. What this means, obviously, is that the size of your network, if my network on Google+ is quite small, the people that I follow are quite small, I'd better hope that one of them has done the sharing of the content that I care about. But what I'd really like to do is have a huge network. I'm not illustrating it well. A huge, huge, huge network that encompasses, hopefully, hundreds of thousands of people who are following me. You can see Danny Sullivan I think right now has something like 390,000 people who are in his circles. When you think about the power of that, everything that Danny has ever shared, ever +1'd, ever put on Google+ is going to appear in those hundreds of thousands of people's search results higher than it normally would. Right now Google is being extremely liberal about this, ranking things that may not even have the keywords in the title tag, maybe only have ancillary relevance to the keyword search that's going on. So they are really, really pushing this forward.

Then in one of the most aggressive moves I've ever seen Google make they have a new box on the side of the search results. This box says, "People and Pages on Google+." So for example, I did a search, a logged out search for news, and I could see entities that have their Google+ pages featured over here with their pictures. There were no pictures over here. I was logged out. I wasn't getting any of the "so and so +1 this," but here I was getting suggestions of brands that I should be following on Google+. These weren't major brands. They were smaller brands - I didn't even recognize them - with a few hundred thousand people in their circles.

Kenny was sitting next to me at the computer, side by side, here in the Whiteboard Friday room, and he did a search for "SEO" and up popped myself, Rand Fishkin, and Danny Sullivan. Think of the power of that. If you can have your brand, your personal brand on Google+ associated with a broad term like SEO, or web marketing, or surveys, or used cars, or whatever it is that you're selling or the idea that you're trying to promote, insanely powerful. This is one of the biggest reasons why I think Google+ is going to force its own success inside Google Search results.

Remember, when we talk about the power of Facebook marketing, we're talking about 800, or so, million Facebook users. Google Search has literally billions of users performing billions of searches a day. So the user group for this is absolutely phenomenal, just tremendous. It's not just in the US, although Google Search Plus Your World is much more US focused right now. I suspect it will be rolling out in the weeks and months to come.

So obviously, Google+ in search results, the personalization that we talked about where these results are ranking higher, you can see an example of that down here. Your images related to you, you'll see this little icon, this guy here. When you see that icon, that means it's being personalized. Google+ is essentially personalizing your results inside of Google Search to show you content that they think is either your content or content of people that you're connected to. Photos is one of the most obvious ones that they're showing right now. But they'll show you profiles, they'll show you links and URLs that have shared, that you've shared, that they think are part of your world. Fascinating stuff, but definitely a bias towards Google+ related content. If you're sharing on Facebook, on Twitter, on LinkedIn, you're rarely ever going to see this here unless you have some very deep social connections, often through Google+ or through Quora, which is kind of how Google is accessing social data to Twitter and Facebook right now.

Number Three, Google+ adoption. I think things like this, look at this, "Learn how you could appear here too." There's a link right there so for those searches, when CNN does a search for news and they go, "Where are we?" Well, "Learn how you can appear here too." "Oh, well we'd better get on that. We've got to get a campaign going. If we don't, we're going to be losing out," because they know people are going to be clicking on these results rather than on these results. The adoption of Google+, something over 60 million users right now, I would suspect that number rises to 100 million very fast, almost certainly by the end of this year.

The richness of the snippets and mark up, you can see the visuals in here, the visuals on the side, the visuals with the personal elements, with the images, with the icons of people that you know and follow, and entities and brands that you know and follow on the service. It's going to be absolutely huge. Imagine having the ability to have endorsements of your brand from people that your customers already know. I think that's going to be a big one.

Number Five, I see Google using this long term, perhaps even in the short term if they can get enough adoption, for web spam and search quality signals. Essentially saying, "Hey, this brand, this entity, this website, these URLs, they have no activity whatsoever in our social graph. They haven't been shared through any service that we can connect to, nor have they been shared on Google+ or +1'd. I'm not so sure that this website is of high quality. It just seems to have a bunch of links pointing to it. Perhaps we should be discounting some of that link graph unless there are social supporting elements." I think over time that's one of the ways that they intend to fight manipulative link spam. So definitely, people need to be thinking about that from a marketing perspective.

Number Six, the biasing to social and Google+ in Search. For a long time, search results had, yeah you could do a search like this, you would see some social results. They'd generally be the one or two bottom results if there was something relevant. But nowadays, you're seeing that Google is essentially saying, "You know what? We are willing to forego a little bit of quality and relevance in favor of showing Google+ and social stuff in our results more heavily." I think that's them saying, "We're going all in, baby."

Now this being said, I won't get into it, but I think there are certainly some risks for Google, that quality and relevancy stuff, there are a lot of examples out there on the Web, on blog posts, all over the place, on Mashable, on TechCrunch, on Paris Lemon's blog. Danny Sullivan wrote about it on Search Engine Land, that Google's not doing the best job with relevancy because they're biasing to this Google+ stuff. That being said, if they keep doing this, if they stick with it, I think marketers, and brands, and companies, and pages will embrace this and make sure that these results are good. Over time, Google can pull back and show the more and more relevant stuff as more stuff gets shared on Google+.

So I think the only institutional risk that I see with this program that Google's rolled out is the governments of the world essentially saying, "Hey, you're doing monopolistic behavior using your vast market share advantage in Search to force people to use your social network." I don't want to comment on that. I'm not a lawyer. I'm not a political expert, or anything like that, but what I can say is, as a marketer, Google's very, very clearly forcing our hand and making sure that we use Google+. If I were you I would be setting up a Google+ content strategy. I would be making sure that whatever social sharing I'm currently doing also applies to Google+. If you are tweeting it, you're Facebook sharing it, you're posting it to LinkedIn, you're putting it in your Pinterest board, for God's sake man, put it on Google+! You're losing out if you're not because the biasing is so heavy right now.

All right, everyone, I hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard+. I look forward to the comments, participating in those. We will certainly have more content coming soon around specific tactics and strategies for Google+. I hope you will join us again. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com


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Photo: POTUS Does Some Painting

The White House Your Daily Snapshot for
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
 

POTUS Does Some Painting

Yesterday the First and Second Families spent the day volunteering as part of a national day of service in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

President Obama, the First Lady, and Malia Obama volunteered at a local elementary school, while the Vice President and Dr. Jill Biden traveled to Philadelphia to take part in the largest Martin Luther King Jr. Day event in the nation.

Learn more about how the Obama Administration is honoring Dr. King's legacy.

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President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama paint during a Martin Luther King, Jr. Day service event in Washington, D.C., Jan. 16, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

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