Search Results for: whole lotta sharing going on

Whole Lotta Sharing Going On

July 6, 2011 by

Sharing is a human activity that is driving the social web these days.

Thus, it is one that deserves your attention if you expect to be relevant in the communities you engage with and your business serves.

Social Sharing and Social Graphs

Anytime a link is shared on the social web it creates a node in multiple social graphs – yours and those you are sharing with.

Those nodes are searchable by Google and the other search engines.  This is why Google encourages sharing – and why their red-hot their Google+ social network makes it so easy to do this.

Here’s an extensive article for those that want to learn more about How to Prepare Your Business for Social Search.  And here’s an earlier one that details What Your Business Needs to Know About Social Graphs.

Google+ is still available by invitation only.  They are still rolling out anticipated options, such as the equivalent of Facebook pages for business.

When you do get access to Google+ you should plan on jumping in feet first.

Let me explain why.

Google is 100% Searchable – Facebook is Not

Facebook is presently the largest social networking community.

However, Facebook is not searchable – for the most part.  Sure, Facebook pages are being indexed by Google and Bing, but the majority of the rich content on Facebook that is being shared amongst friends via their personal profiles is invisible to all of the search engines.

Yesterday this site profiled Wajam, a social search engine that is doing its best to bring you the recommendations of your friends on Twitter and Facebook, and they are doing an admirable job at that – slowly but surely focusing search on those whose opinions you value most.

It’s a resource that I’ve found to be valuable.

Nevertheless, the average consumer uses Google to search the open web, which is why that big pond is still the place to be if you expect to tap into the the 2/3 majority of searches being made on the web.

Today Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed in this video that sharing on Facebook is growing exponentially.

His intent is obviously to encourage more advertisers to tap into the 750 million active Facebook users. For this reason, even if you are a small business, Facebook is an ideal place to advertise.

Nevertheless, you cannot deny the fact that Google serves up 65% of all search results on the open web.

Share and Share Alike

The key to being findable by your ideal future customers is to understand is as follows:

1. Understand you have a social graph for each and every social networking site.  Create content for your communities on those sites and encourage sharing.   This enhances your social graph, and thereby aligns you with more of your potentially ideal customers.

2. Recognize that search drives the web, and content drives search.  You and your small business have to take content marketing seriously. Help your community with your expertise and they will willingly share your message with their friends.

3. Share and share alike.  Sharing is a team sport. When you help to share the hard work of your friends, peers, and even complete strangers, you will encourage more sharing of the expertise you have worked so hard to acquire and capture on your blog, website, Facebook page, or wherever you make your home on the social web.

If you have been hanging around here for a while, you know I only comment on what I have thoroughly experienced – and therefore recommend.

As I learn and experience more with Google+ I will comment further.

In the meantime, take sharing to heart and Dust off Your Google Profile to get ready for Google+.

When you do get access to Google+, that descriptive profile will have you off to the races for ramping up the web visibility and reputation of your small business.

And that will surely lead you to more referrals.

Do you have any doubts that search is going social – and that sharing is a vital component?

Sorry about the abundance of links, but I had a lot to share!

Leave a comment below or share this with your social community on Facebook or Twitter.  You may also wish to try the Google+1 button in the red bar at the bottom of your browser.

Until tomorrow,  Jeff

The Value of Social Media Sharing

June 26, 2013 by
Technorati Top Small Business Blogs


Technorati Top Small Business Blogs

 

The Jeff Korhan New Media and Small Business Marketing blog enjoyed a great week, leaping back into the Technorati Small Business Top 100 Rankings.

How does this happen?

While producing great content helps, it is not enough – not nearly enough. Your content has to get shared, again and again.

Original content is fuel for helping your customers – and social media sharing is the flame that ignites it.

Getting Your Content Shared

To start, you have to earn the right to be shared, and that does require having a base of solid content that is the result of understanding your business and its customers – and then showing up to do the work of creating it.

Your content is a body of work that earns the attention of your community. If you consistently provide value, the community will engage with your business blog, with a few even taking a moment to leave a comment.

This is precisely how I first met Jon Loomer. Since then, we have crossed paths as guest bloggers at Social Media Examiner, something that would not have been possible without our respectively building a base of content worthy of the standards of Social Media Examiner.

Links from prominent sites like Social Media Examiner significantly contribute to the ranking of your blog. Now fast forward a few years to just last week, when I did an interview with Jon Loomer on his Social Media Pubcast.

Jon’s podcast is so popular that we scheduled that conversation months into the future. So, in addition to the time investment for doing your own work, you have to be patient about your content sharing.

This is a marathon – not a sprint.

Get in The Game and Let Serendipity Happen

Jon Loomer is influential as a Facebook expert, and we had a good time chatting about the new Facebook hashtags. The article I recently wrote on that topic earned quite a few shares, something that occasionally happens when you continue showing up to do the work of helping your community.

Serendipity played a role in helping that article reach a larger audience, because my content is syndicated by Business 2 Community and Social Media Informer, which both significantly helped to earn it even more shares.

These partner relationships would not be possible without first creating content worthy of sharing.

So, the lesson is simple.

Create content to the best of your ability, keep showing up to do it again, and reach out every now and then to expand your audience by joining the communities of other blogs.

Oh yeah, and don’t forget to share and share alike.

When you share, you create opportunities for new relationships. That’s how I met Jon Loomer, Mike Stelzner at Social Media Examiner, and lots of other cool people.

The web is designed for sharing.

You simply cannot do this alone. You need friends and allies.

The aforementioned Technorati ranking may have my name on it, but it was a team effort that was years in the making.

Are you ready to get started building yours?

About the Author:  Jeff Korhan, MBA, helps mainstream small businesses create exceptional customer experiences that accelerate business growth. Get more from Jeff on LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+.

Jeff is also the author of Built-In Social: Essential Social Marketing Practices for Every Small Business – (Wiley 2013)

Can You Really Help Your Customer?

December 22, 2011 by

Whenever someone asks if you can help them, there is only one thing they are considering.

Do you really have the necessary direct experience to first understand their situation – and then the acquired knowledge for applying a viable solution.

People and Google LIKE Direct Experience

People like direct experience. This is why they are highly influenced by reviews on Amazon, Yelp, and TripAdvisor.

Of course, Google likes what people like. Their mission is to bring all of us more of what we are searching for so that they can profit from selling ads that further accomplish that objective.

When you share your experience of successfully working with hundreds or thousands of customers, you instantly differentiate your small business.

Relevant experience gives buyers confidence that they are working with someone that has been there and done it so many times they can do again in their sleep.

Most prospects will notice your marketing, but astute ones pay more attention to subtle signals that you can indeed help them.

The challenge for new businesses is acquiring requisite experience. This means someone has to take a chance to give it to them. Some will, but they will usually expect concessions in return.

Smart marketers sell direct experience – not stories borrowed from the Internet.

If you don’t have direct experience, the best thing you can do is to get it from those that do.

An ideal way to accomplish this is to offer to help them for free. Everyone can use an extra hand once in a while.

Get into the trenches with them and get that direct experience. Now you have a valid story that will resonate with those seeking your help.

In fact, you may even be able to offer a valuable fresh perspective, as well as some special expertise.

People and Google LOVE Recent Experience

The only thing more relevant than direct experience is recent experience. This why Google ranks recent content highly.

What else is relevant? Extensive experience. Google associates this with authority.

The combination of decades of experience with recently being in the game is powerful. You have likely encountered just about every obstacle one could imagine, and because your expertise is current – you know what to do next.

As the founder and owner of several small businesses, I understand most people like to know the owner is involved with their project. However, they also prefer working directly with the most skilled specialists.

In other words, customers want both relevant and extensive experience – as a result, so does Google. 

My landscape construction services business had a process that required four meetings to consummate a deal. As the business owner, I was always at the most important meetings, #1 and #4.  This was when we were introducing the capabilities or our company, and when we were closing a deal.

Meetings #2 and #3 were more involved with the technical work – something that my landscape architects could do more capably than me.

I could have and did handle all four meetings when my business was getting off the ground, so I indeed acquired direct experience during those years.

Yet, I maintained my relevancy by being involved with each and every project – applying my strengths when appropriate while also delegating to those with greater talent and more recent training in the technical aspects of our work.

My direct experience with hundreds of customers allowed me to introduce thousands of relevant stories. However, once the technical work began, my presence was unnecessary overhead.

That was our process for really helping our customers.

What’s yours?

Marketing today heavily favors content marketing and social sharing that validates your direct, extensive, and recent experience helping customers – much like those you are seeking to attract.

The most valuable thing you can do to enhance your marketing is to have direct interaction with real and live customers – yours or those of a more experienced colleague and friend.

Marketers are skilled at talking the talk – but the successful ones can prove they have also walked the walk.

Leave a comment below or share this with your community with any of the share buttons below – or with those on the little red bar at the bottom of this page.  

Until tomorrow,  Jeff

Photo Credit: renjith krishnan

A Little Blogging Secret

November 30, 2011 by

A belief that many small businesses share is that delivering exceptional work will naturally attract everything necessary to support their business.

This is also one of the secrets of blogging – stay in the game, strive to create valuable, innovative and inspiring content, and everything else will fall into place.

Hardly a day goes by when I cannot point to one particular article that drives more than 50% of the traffic to this site. It’s really quite astonishing – and a function of social sharing.

Logic tells us that when you post an article your audience consumes it – and hopefully responds.

Based upon my experience, that is rarely true.

When you consistently create useful content – information that is valuable for your target audience, it seemingly rises to the surface when its time is right – effectively introducing you, your site, and your business to a new audience.

The little secret is that blogging is not a linear game.

One home run is not going to win the game. You have to keep pounding out base hits, grind out more yardage, and sink as many putts as possible.

The Secret

Over the last few weeks, this article on protecting your Facebook account from hackers has generated an enormous amount of traffic for me – one that I wrote 4 months ago.

Why? I have no idea. It could be the result of posting it on my son’s Facebook wall after he and a bunch of his college buddies were hacked.

In other words, the secret of blogging is about consistency – creating content whose value will eventually find its day.

More recently, this article on asking your customers the tough questions has generated hundreds of clicks for several days running. It was an article I was particular proud of when I wrote it, but it produced very little traffic at the time.

My Analysis

For you and me, blogging is not just about delivering the news – that’s what the big media outlets do.

For small businesses, blogging is more about planting seeds.

What is cool is those seeds have multiple lives – germinating again and again as they are shared on the social web.

Perennial Flowers

What is awesome and cool is usually transitory – it quickly fades.  As a former landscape architect and contractor, we created some amazing floral displays with annuals flowers.

They were indeed awesome – but only for a few weeks.

As a blogger, you are more interested in planting perennials – a floral show that comes back again and again.  

Annual flowers are like a one hit wonder – they have their day and quickly fade.

Perennial flowers deliver value for years to come – and your evergreen blog content does the same.

Gardeners know they cannot predict the weather, any more than you can predict the tastes, needs, and desires of your community. That’s why the foundation of your blog has to be perennial – delivering content that conceivably has value today and long into the future.

There is nothing wrong with seizing the day – capturing a relevant moment for your audience.

Though the secret to blogging is building a sustainable digital asset that delivers value again and again – often when you least expect it.

Leave a comment below or share this with your community with any of the share buttons below – or with those on the little red bar at the bottom of this page.  

Until tomorrow,  Jeff

Photo Credit: antonychammond

It’s Only a Matter of Time

August 23, 2011 by

Years ago we used to joke about not knowing how to program our VHS recorders.

Eventually the pain of missing our favorite television programs forced us to learn.

That piece of technology was for entertainment.  Now technology has become essential to running a smart business.

One of those technologies is web marketing, which includes social media and Internet marketing. Are you still resisting it?  You can admit it.

While I embraced social media over five years ago, I was slow to build my email list. And because I didn’t really trust Facebook, it was only in the last year or so that I created a professional page for my business.

It’s only a matter of time until we have to make the changes that we need to make – especially with respect to our businesses. Not all of those changes involve technology, but many of them are strongly influenced by it.

Relationship Selling

You can be indeed be successful at selling without  using social media. However, social media will make you better, because it will serve to provide more detailed information for those you are engaged with.  It will also spread the good things you do to a larger audience.

And it will do all of that 24/7.

Still don’t have time for social media?  Not interested in Facebook? That’s alright, because its only a matter of time.

When you discover you are losing business as a result of not getting in the game, that may be the the pain that gets gets you to change.

Email Marketing

For years I passively collected emails from my website.  Now I actively encourage subscriptions to my digital newsletter, and for good reason.

The difference now is I am consistently providing a great deal of value in my newsletter; so I can more confidently recommend it.  Now that digital newsletters have social integration, that value also gets shared on the social networks – further expanding my audience.

Email still works.  In fact, in my opinion, it works better than ever.

Those that subscribe to my newsletter tend to be loyal and active members of this community.  They are the ones that are most likely to want the best I have to offer – even if there is an investment involved – such as my two day intensive Social Media Summit on September 29th and 30th here in Chicago (sorry, no landing page yet).

The cost is minimal and the hotel rates at the O’Hare Marriott Courtyard are exceptional, so contact me if you are interested (it’s limited to 18 go-getters).

The point is we all need to be able to reach out to our customers in ways that are acceptable. Email happens to be one of them.

Search Engine Optimization

This is my favorite example of how business has changed. Websites used to be a bonus – but have since become a necessity.  If you don’t have an active website you may as well not be in business, at least that is the conclusion of many consumers.

Today you need a good website that is also optimized for search.  Given the rapid shift towards social search, this means you need social integration – and an active presence on the social networks.

Would it surprise you to learn that Google is now incorporating user generated social content in their paid advertising placements? It’s amazing to consider how things have changed.

Decades ago content was created by experts and distributed by outlets with authority – such as major news outlets, respected publications such as encyclopedias, and the libraries that housed those volumes.  Remember that?

Now that everything is available online, the experts have changed.  Wikipedia, blogs, and other user generated sites are now the respected authorities.  You know it, I know it, and most importantly, Google and the other search engines know it.

The Future is Mobile

If you are still with me, you have to be asking yourself what’s next?  The answer is an easy one.  Mobile.

It will be necessary to have mobile friendly or mobile optimized websites. If you want to learn a little more about this, read this article on QR code marketing I wrote for Social Media Examiner (ignore the opening video – not my idea).

Do you remember your first “cordless” telephone or wireless television remote control? That’s now laughable when you realize how far we have come.

Now we have voice and facial recognition technology.  What’s after that, mind reading?

I know I won’t bet against it!  The reason being thoughts are transmitted energy.  They are no different than the digital communications we have today.

It’s only a matter of time, isn’t it?

What’s laughable today is likely to become reality in the very near future.  This is why I plan to do my best to make the changes in my business for adapting to the technologies that are available to us today.

How about you?

Are you thinking Jeff Korhan is crazy – or does this line of thinking have merit for you and your business?

Leave a comment below or share this with your social community by liking it on Facebook, or sharing with any of the share buttons below – or on the little red bar at the bottom of this page.  

Until tomorrow,  Jeff

4 Ways to Clean Up Your Site for SEO

July 31, 2011 by

You already know that serving up valuable content that gets consumed and shared is the primary way to have your site ranked higher by Google – especially if those inbound links are from other sites of authority.

Did you also know that Google interprets subtle signals that your site may be sending that could be working against your content marketing plan – effectively downgrading its SEO?

Everything Google and the other search engines do is designed to respond to web content as a human would – which is why you should learn to do the same.

According to a source from a redondo beach seo firm, to illustrate this, here are four considerations that you have probably never considered when evaluating your website – but that you will nevertheless recognize have merit and deserve your attention.

#1 – Is Your Site Uncluttered and Visually Appealing?

Many believe that if they use more of the services offered by Google, it will smile favorably on their site.  One example of this is loading up your site with Google ads.

According to the SEO experts at SEOmoz, this is not a good idea.

It is essential to consider the user’s experience for real people.  While Google is certainly happy to have you serving up their ads, you will be compensated for the clicks you deliver – and that comes from content that brings in more eyeballs.

If your site is overly cluttered with ads, they could not all be relevant to the content you are delivering.  This is when it becomes evident to Google that the true purpose of your site is not primarily to deliver useful content – but to serve up ads.

As a result, it will get downgraded. I had the pleasure of having one of my close friends guide me through most of my learning when it comes to SEO. A Hartford Search Engine Optimization Expert can help take your business to the next level. It sure worked for me.

Ads are useful, and Google knows their ads will earn more clicks if they are associated with quality content.  Focus on creating a favorable user experience for your audience.  Google will reward you for it because they know their ads will earn more clicks as a result.

#2 – Is Your URL Excessively Lengthy?

Large corporations pay dearly to have a short and simple url for their primary site.  Even tech start-ups do the same.

I recently interviewed Wajam’s CEO, Martin-Luc Archambault, for this article on social search.  I was curious about the meaning of the company name.  It turns out it has no meaning at all.  It was one of many available dot.com urls that were short, with Wajam being the one that when tested against others proved to be memorable.

So, when it comes to SEO and urls – length matters.  What also matters are things like hyphens in a url that suggest a copycat of the original.  When choosing a url, Martin suggested a simple test.  If it can be spoken and understood in a crowded bar, and therefore remembered, its probably a keeper.

#3 – Does Your Site Load Quickly?

There are many factors that affect the health of your site, and some of them are beyond your control – which may even include the site hosting itself.  If you happen to be on a self-hosted WordPress site as I am, then you can choose your own hosting.

Do your own research as it is a competitive market.  I read lots of comments from many forums and finally settled on InMotion Hosting – with whom I’ve been very pleased.

Beyond hosting, the most significant thing is the architecture of your site.  Are there lots of images or videos on your home page?  That alone will dramatically slow any site down.

A clean site loads faster – this includes business class hosting, solid architecture like Studiopress, and customization by a professional designer that understands code.

#4 – Is Your Site Following All of the Links That Follow You?

If you link to all of the sites that link to you then you are sending Google a signal that those are not earned links.

According to a Melbourne SEO expert, a site that has true authority does not have to practice link sharing.  Think of this as like celebrities that only follow a few hundred folks on Twitter, but still have millions of followers. This is an indication that they have authority.

Contrary to what some believe, having several outbound links is not a problem.  If you are linking to authoritative sites, such as valid experts, then those serve as reference points to experts – just as the bibliography of a book does.

They show Google that you’ve done your homework.

What All of This Means

Do these factors carry a lot of weight?  No, not individually – but they are cumulative.  There are so many factors that Google uses to rank sites – and they will give them different degrees of weight over time, as well as adding new parameters.

Think of SEO as the health of your site.  One little thing is not going to make or break your health or SEO ranking, but over the long haul they do indeed eventually make a difference.

What are your thoughts?  Does your site stand up well to some of these factors that correlate with a negative SEO?

Leave a comment below or share this with your social community.  

Until tomorrow,  Jeff

Photo Credit: Frederric Poirot