Buzzmaker

In the last decade our habits have changed tremendously. Today when we want to do something or when we want to find out anything we use a search engine. Google has changed our lives forever. School kids are looking for answers over the internet. When you meet somebody you Google him (yes it is a verb) to find more about her/him. You want to cook something, you Google. You want to buy a flight, you Google. You need a book, you Google. are you thinking to change your car or your house, you go first to Google. But what about you, what about your products or skills. How can they get found on the internet? Improve your chances to get found with these 10 tips:

1. Create compelling content. You read this post because you think it’s useful. If you have compelling content people will reach you sooner or later. You can post your content on your blog, your company website, as a whitepaper, on other people blogs (guest posting) or on twitter (if it comes in short form). You can find ideas on what to write in different places. Search on forums to see what people are looking for, what problems need to be solved. Look on sites like HARO (help a reporter out) to see what subjects are researched. See what people are searching for  and write your post today.

2. Include your keywords in the title. The title is the most important. You need to make it interesting, to make people click on it. One of the most brilliant titles I’ve seen lately is “In bed with Seth Godin“. It is compelling, It lured me to read the post, to tweet about it and now, to tell you. It has the keywords embedded in it (Seth Godin). For your title to get found, you have to decide on your keywords (words that people will search for your content). For ideas on keywords you can use the Google keyword tool (Free) or a paid tool like Market Samurai.

3. Include keywords in the body of your article. Keywords should be repeated in the copy. In this way Google and other search engines will index your article. If you repeat too much these words, it may be considered as spam. You should keep them less than 5.5% of your copy.

4. Create a description that contains your keywords. This is also very important. You should fill in the meta description and meta title tags for your posts. If you do not find them use a plugin like All in one SEO plugin for WordPress blogs. These tags help your article to be indexed by search engines. You will want to include the words defined above in these tags so your article is indexed correctly.

5. Use social bookmarking sites such as Digg, delicious, StumbleUpon. After you’ve published the content you can submit it to Digg, delicious, StumbleUpon. You should use these tools regularly, not only for your posts but for the articles you find interesting on the web. Then you could summarize them and create a new post. You should give your readers the possibility to bookmark you content by including buttons on the bottom of your article.

6. Promote your post on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or other social networking sites. Social networks are a great way to promote your content. You can leverage your audience and get back-links to your blog or website. These will increase your content’s ranking in search engines

7. Comment on related sites and forums. Comments and answers establish trust and show your expertise. Besides that you may get referred and linked back to your site helping you more on the search engine rankings. A great resource for this is  LinkedIn Answers.

8. Promote your content on directories. I use to promote my content on InboundMarketing.com. You can find similar sites for your niche.

10. Put your last post in your e-mail signature. You are reading a lot of e-mails daily. You also write some. Beside your contact information you can include your last post in the signature. This is an underutilized way to promote your content and help other find you on the internet.

If you want to learn more on how to be found on the internet listen to the free course bellow. Did you liked my 10 tips, do you disagree, have a question or just a comment? Leave me a note bellow.

SEO Crash Course to Get Found (GF102)

photo credits: dannysullivan

Yesterday I found an interesting post on Dan Schawbel blog. The debate was Conversation or Content. Who rules the Internet? I think that in the first years the Internet we had this split (Web 1.0). We had either content (websites mostly static) or we had conversations (forums). The model was not perfect so we improved it and Web 2.0 was born. And so came the blogs.

What defines a blog? A blog has two very important characteristics:

1. It offers the possibility to quickly and easily create and publish your content
2. Has a mechanism that allow readers to leave comments or another form of feedback

If you miss any of the above you do not have a blog. For sure you can argue that Seth Godin for example, does not accept comments. You are right but he accepts trackbacks which is a form of feedback.

Coming back to conversations or content discussion we can see that a blog has both. It has content created and published usually by the owner and it has the feedback mechanisms that spark the conversations. And that’s why blogging got so much traction. In 2008 13% of the US population was maintaining a blog. This will increase to 17% form the US population by 2013. The readers of blogs represented in 2008 45% of the US population and they will increase to 58% by 2013. This means that by 2013 128 million people in the US will read blogs while 38 million will blog.

When you start blogging the first thing you have to decide is what to blog about. If you are blogging for business you should ask yourself who are your customers and then figure out what are they interested about. Statistics show that you will find your blogging “voice” and you’ll figure out how to blog after creating the first 30 posts.

By now you should have a lot of questions: How to blog? Is blogging for me? What platform to use? What should I write about? What layout should my blog have? What theme should I choose? What domain name? Most of these questions will be answered in the first class of Inbound Marketing University that you can watch below. Learn how to blog, enjoy and if you have more questions or comments, post them below.

How to Blog Effectively for Business (GF101)

Photo credits by Courtney Bolton

When I first started to blog, I wanted just a simple platform for my thoughts. Then I found out that I need to know a lot of things. I had to learn and test different platforms (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal), themes, widgets, plugins, SEO, SEM and so on. It’s been a great journey but I could not help to think that it could have been simpler. Now for each blog I use the same platform (WordPress), for most of them I use the same theme (Thesis)  I have a set of plugins that I use.

Today I found a great offer. The problem is that it expires on June 4th so if you want to take advantage of it you should act fast. You can get the Thesis Theme bundled with a plugin (ScribeSEO) for which you will get a discounted price ($27/month instead of $97/month) for as long as you choose to use the product. And everything comes with a 30 day money back guarantee.

How it all works? It’s as simple as 1-2-3:

1. Purchase your Thesis theme from here

2. Email me your order reference number that you received form DIYThemes and I will send you a special code for getting the ScribeSEO Advanced plugin for $27/month (instead of $97/month).

3. Sign-up for ScribeSEO Advanced here before June 4th 2010 using the code I sent you.

Here is what you will get in this bundle:

The renowned Thesis Theme used by Chris Brogan (chrisbrogan.com), Brian Clark (Copyblogger.com) and many other. Thesis is the search engine optimized WordPress theme of choice for serious online publishers. If you’re a blogger who doesn’t understand a lot of PHP, Thesis will give a ton of functionality without having to alter any code. For the advanced, Thesis has incredible customization possibilities via Thesis hooks.

With so many design options, you can use the template over and over and never have it look like the same site. The theme is robust and flexible enough not only to accommodate a site like the ones here, but also to enable the site to run far more efficiently than it ever has before.

Go on a guided video tour of Thesis and see the amazing things you can do with this theme!  You’ll love it.
Check out the Thesis demo site
See more Thesis-based sites in the gallery showcase

ScribeSEO plugin helps writers create content that gets found online, and that’s become as valued and important as any old scroll or parchment.
Scribe is an SEO software service (web-based and a WordPress version) that analyzes the content of web pages, blog posts, online press releases, you name it… at the click of a button.
The Scribe API then reports back and tells web writers, bloggers, affiliate marketers, and small business owners how to tweak their content to get more search engine traffic, all while maintaining quality reader-focused copy.
It’s like having an SEO expert as an editorial assistant.
What’s innovative about Scribe is in the way it differs from typical SEO tools. Instead of asking you for a keyword phrase and then pushing you to construct content around it, Scribe:

• Analyzes what you’ve already written, preserving your natural flow
• Reveals what search engines will think you’re writing about
• Suggests changes to better reflect the language searchers are using
• Guides you through remaining content elements based on SEO best practices

With Scribe you’ll:

• Optimize content faster
• Eliminate guesswork about keywords
• Employ SEO best practices
• Preserve maximum readability
• Increase targeted traffic!

Find out more about ScribeSEO or take Scribe on a free Test Drive now.

Image by Ella’s Dad

I am a Thesis and Scribe affiliate but this is the only way I can make this great offer.

Whatever we do, we need marketing. Whether is for selling our products, for getting a better job or just for strengthening our personal brand we need to employ certain marketing techniques. But how and where can we learn these techniques?

There a tons of sites that offer free or paid advice. But it takes time to find those sites, then to try what they are teaching and find out what is working for you or not for your business.

There is another way to do this. We can find out who are the gurus, ninjas or experts in marketing and try to reach them, participate in their seminars and learn from them. The main issue is that we cannot stop learning while new things are discovered every day. So we need to establish a relationship with these experts and participate at their seminars regularly.

But I found a better way. The Third Tribe Marketing. It was founded by Chris Brogan (New Marketing Labs), Brian Clark (CopyBlogger), Darren Rowse (ProBlogger.net) and Sonia Simone (Remarkable Communications). to provide the most effective Internet marketing information available, not just from the founders, but from people that master this art.

Since I joined the Third Tribe I more than 10 hours of audio content:

Product Launch Strategies: What Always Works and What’s Working in 2010

Jeff Walker & Sonia Simone

How to Get Your Customers to Do Your Best Marketing for You

John Jantsch & Chris Brogan

Email Marketing Strategies that Work

Sonia Simone & Brian Clark

Action Email: Copywriting Tips for Insanely Effective Email Marketing

Dave Navarro & Sonia Simone

Internet Business Models: Part One – the Problogger model

Darren Rowse & Brian Clark

Internet Business Models: Part Two – the Chris Brogan model

Chris Brogan & Sonia Simone

Internet Business Models: Part Three – the Copyblogger model

Brian Clark & Sonia Simone

Internet Business Models: Part Four – the Zen Habits model

Leo Babauta & Darren Rowse

The Quick Start Guide to Making Money Online

Johnny Truant & Sonia Simone

Advanced Affiliate Marketing with Social Media and SEO

Brian Clark & Glenn Allsopp

This plus a lot of new marketing content is what you’ll get if you join Third Tribe Marketing today. You will get also a lot of useful advice on the forums and you’ll find a lot of new friends ready to help you. And if you join before June 1st, 2010 your membership fee remains locked at the current price ($47/month) for as long as you will enjoy the community. If instead you choose to join after June 1st the price will go up ($97/month) so better join today.

Everyone wants to get maximum out of our online campaigns. We want to have the highest ROI possible and to engage as many people we can. But the first thing we have to do is to create content. And because this can be in different forms we need to translate it in a way that can be indexed by the search engines. The search engines will then drive the people that look for our content directly to our site, blog, twitter stream or YouTube video. But before that we need to tailor what we write for search engines. This process is also called SEO (search engine optimization) and it helps your content to rank better for the chosen keywords. But we realized that if you first create the copy and then you try to optimize it for search is not the best way. If the copy we create is not good enough to attract good, natural links, it does not matter how much we are going to optimize it. The best way is to write the copy in a way that will be best understood by search engines. This is called SEO copywriting.

SEO copywriting is not an easy task. We need to think about our keywords and include them in the title and in our copy in a natural way. We also need to include links. Then we need to customize the title tag and description and these have to contain the keywords we selected previously. In the end we need to be sure that our keywords appear frequent enough to be considered keywords but  not to frequent so that your copy will not be considered spam.

If you want more information on SEO copywriting and tips on improving your blogging read the bellow free ebook:

In the last couple of weeks I have launched a new site. It’s called Personal Brand Grader and it delivers advice and tools for improving your personal brand but this is not about what I want to talk today. Instead I will tell you about a tool I have found when working on Personal Brand Grader. It’s called ScribeSEO and it helps optimizing your blog posts for search engines.

When we write a blog post or any piece of internet content we have to take into account a lot of things like the number of words a post should have, the frequency of the keywords present in the article, their prominence or density, what tags you should post for your article and so on. Unfortunately Scribe will not write the post for you. Instead it will give you the statistics for your article, it will give you a grade based on how optimized is your piece of content, it will recommend the tags for your post and it will give you a lot of advice on optimizing your article and changing keywords. I have used this service for the past month and it is just brilliant. It has optimized my posts from the beginning (before posting them) and it has also educated me on what I should consider when writing a headline, description or the body of the article. So in time I managed to get high SEO grades on my articles from the first analysis.

The SEO service is developed to be either a WordPress plugin which is great for those that use WordPress to power their blogs. You just have to press a button and your post gets analyzed and optimized. It has also a web based version. With this last one you can optimize any piece of content, grade it and when you are content with what you got you just have to copy and paste it in your CMS (Content Management System).

The only downside of this service is that you have to pay for it. The price starts from $27 a month for 30 evaluations which is more than enough if you have just a blog. You can choose the publisher option that gives you 120 evaluations for $47 or the advanced option where you have to pay $97 for 300 SEO evaluations.

If you want to became an Inbound Marketing Certified Professional join me  for free. Just go to Inbound Marketing University and register for the classes. This season you have 2 new ones. The first one is held by Mitch Joel from Twist Image and author of Six Pixels of Separation: Everyone Is Connected. Connect Your Business to Everyone. and the second one is held by Paula Berg from Sothwest Airlines.

If you just want to learn more about inbound marketing you can get the recordings of the previous classes here and if you like them drop me a comment bellow.

I found this video on YouTube. I have seen a similar presentation live and it taught me that it doesn’t matter if you are the future president or you are a small business owner you have access to the same tools and head for the same results. Enjoy the video and leave your opinion below.

PayPal Puzzle

I was writing last week about the challenge launched by PayPal. If you cannot sleep until you solve the mystery here is the solution: you have to go to https://www.x.com/confinity/, enter the word you see on the screen and then enter the Konami code in order to enter the site. Then you will find out what is all about but I will not talk about this now. Instead I will ask what do you think? Is this type of promotion effective? What PayPal is trying to achieve in this way? Are you thinking to use a similar scenario to promote your product?

The second session of IMU trainings has ended. Besides the great program and the famous speakers here are my 5 takeaways from the Inbound Marketing University:
1. New friends. If you enroll in an offline training you sure will get new friends. But what about an online course? The ways of making friends are somehow different. You cannot get out for a drink with them because they may be on the other side of the world but you still chat with them and you can find a lot of people with the same interests. And yes, I got some new great friends from IMU.
2. New community. For this all the kudos go to Hubspot. They created a cross platform way of interaction that is very efficient and keeps the community growing. You can contribute on forums, write new stories, give a hand to other IMU coleagues or ask for help and get the best advice available in the field.
3. New business ideas. The presentations generated some new business ideas. A few of the IMU graduates started their own business while others are making plans for a new launch. And if you plan to start on your own  IMU is a good place to start.
4. Unlimited learning resources. Once you start learning new things you should never stop at least because things are changing quickly in the Inbound Marketing field. IMU and Hubspot are not only offering great learning stuff but they continue to create new webinars, tools andcase studies so you can be on top all the time.
5. A real-life case study. The IMU case study and experiment is not over yet but it already showed a lot of proven ways to market on the web. This is the best lesson one can have.

What were your takeaways from the IMU? Just place a comment below.