You’d be surprised how many forget this one. They choose a platform, they load it up with a million plugins, they advertise to their existing social media circles, but when it comes to writing they miss the mark completely. What is great content? This is material which engages your audience. It is researched, highly structured content posted once a week or more that meets people’s needs head on with solutions. It produces a response (in their sharing) to their questions because it’s entertaining but also informative. Pick a niche, and then research ways i.e. read other blogs and construct a way to say what they are saying, but in your own voice. DO NOT REINVENT THE WHEEL.
Promote properly
I previously mentioned promotion as a way to grow your traffic. But here’s the thing about promotion: too much will kill your success before it gains traction. Many of you, including myself, have probably done the following when starting out: start blog, tweet 100 times a day, get on Facebook and beg people to ”like”, then auction your soul to the Devil when that doesn’t work out. This is not only painful, it’s unnecessary. The best promotion tactics, by far, are the ones which never get talked about. For instance, writing great content often produces a series. Conversion of these articles into PDF format and sharing with eBook directories and free document sites like Scribd or Helium is a great way to bump the odds in your favor. Angering your readers by over-promotion is an avoidable situation, so don’t do it!
Engage your audience
If someone, say a family member or friend, asked you a poignant question which gave you pause, would you ignore them? OF COURSE NOT! You’d jump right on the bullet train to Intelligentsia (sorry, bad puns abound in my world) and figure out a worthwhile reply to their query. So why is it when you post on your site, the only thing you see is the occasional greeting from Grandma? The ‘gurus’ bread and butter is no longer figuring out how to get traffic, it’s merely conversing (read:engagement) about all the traffic they get, thereby getting more. It’s a topic which spews dividends every time it is brought up. Simply put: present a question in your great content, then engage with your audience’s feedback. This method can be accelerated if you use forums to become an expert on your niche and use your blog URL as a signature in your profile.
In the wake of the epic stories surrounding the inimitable Facebook and its latest acquisition, Instagram, one has to wonder how many more questionable actions can manifest from the camp of the social media giant. I, am of course referring to the squawking over the TOS back in December. This could spell long-term PR trouble. What exactly is Facebook doing?
Let’s get the facts straight. Instagram may still be having issues, what with its public traffic data being ripped from public view recently. But the company has apparently stemmed the flow of angry users fleeing the site like a burning building.However sometimes, it’s too little too late, as it’s been widely noted that 25% of the active user base was lost in the aftermath. Instagram backpedaled on the issue, saying, “It would not sell members’ photos”. This was followed closely by a quote from the company, ”that statement is not authorized for publication.” O rly, Instagram? There’s no sense of irony in that statement!
This overarching argument about data and its right to be withheld or published, is a longstanding argument within social media ranks that goes back almost as far as the inception of journalism itself. Facebook, and its user base, is in the midst of a cold war over the fact that deleted accounts do not mean entire removal from the site. Users are able to download their data before doing so, but there is a finite period that accounts are cached in case the user changes their mind. What happens to the data after that time? Is it sold or otherwise leveraged for private gain? Or is it truly erased from the site? Facebook has said that the nature of caching in search engines in addition to “shares” on the site makes 100% data deletion truly impossible.
So the question remains, with only the most recent examples displayed for evidence. To answer the question bluntly, Facebook is shaping privacy policy so that is seemingly transparent but less comprehensible by most who engage the site. When was the last time you actually read a TOS when you registered to a site? A common joke among Facebook critics is, “Facebook is like a reverse eBay; you’re the product and the highest bidder gets access to your life”. So who is the highest bidder assisting Facebook shape privacy policy? Digital Sky Technologies, is the largest investor as of this writing and their partners’ history can be found here.
Apple iPhone 3GS, Motorola Milestone and LG GW60 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The emergence of smartphones as the preferred mobile device of millions of people all around the world has changed not just the way we communicate and handle the various tasks of daily living. It has also changed the way we view commerce.
The increased power and features of smartphones mean a more reliable and stable connection to the internet and this is driving smartphone owners to use it as a device for buying stuff. According to research more than half of consumers use smartphones and of these 70 percent have said that they use their phones to buy online. This was most apparent during the recent holiday season where record numbers of shoppers have used online stores to do their holiday shopping and they used their smartphones to do it and not a laptop or desktop computer. read more
When I think of the popularity of Twitter I think of people walking around New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago, posting about their day and sharing vacation photos with friends. Yet many social users may be surprised to learn that the top tweeting city isn’t in the United States.
Forbes contributor Victor Lipman recently analysts millions of tweets to determine Twitter’s global usage patterns and what he learned was that Jakarta, Indonesia Twitter users are actually the most active on the social platform.
Behind Jakarta was New York City, Tokyo, London, and Sao Paulo. Also making the cut were Paris, Los Angeles, and Bandung, Indonesia. read more
