How To Build Reputation With Your Blog – Interact With Your Audience

This is the third article from the How To Build Reputation With A Blog series. If you came here directly, you may want to check out the first posts in this series:

• How To Build Reputation With A Blog – The Series
• How To Build Reputation With A Blog – Clearly State Your Expertise
• How To Build Reputation With A Blog – Write Constantly

Today will talk about an important part of this process, namely the part in which you start to interact with your audience.

Listen To Them

The first and most important part of this process is to listen to them. Period. They are your audience, they are consuming your products and they know better than you what they want. Really listening to your audience is especially difficult in the first stages of a blog, when all you want to do is to get “out there”, make your message heard and be sure it’s heard by as many people as possible. In this stage, every negative comment will be taken personally. That shouldn’t be a problem. unless you respond in kind. Bitterness and irony are the most common reactions to negative blog comments, especially in the beginning. Well, don’t. Don’t answer in kind.

Taking it off of your chest will make you feel better, but I don’t think it will add to your reputation, on the contrary. As you advance in the blogging world you’re going to realize that negative comments and positive comments aren’t different at all. They’re just reactions. Some of them are signs of a positive reaction you ignited with your post, some of them are signs of a negative reaction. And it’s ok to be like that. You’re not the beholder of the absolute truth and you don’t know their personal circumstances. They have the right to say whatever they want. And you have the right to take from their comments whatever you want. I had my own share of negative comments in some (quite popular posts), you can find one of them here: 33 Ways To Start Your Day.

I started (a little abruptly, I admit) with negative comments because they are pivotal part in the blogging process. The moment you’ll start to generate negative comments is the undoubtable mark of popularity. You’re becoming important. Your words are counting enough to get on the people nerves. You’re bringing in a change and change is always received with rejection (people love their comfort zones, you know). I’m not saying you should hunt for negative comments, that would be equally easy and lame. I’m saying that if you do your job constantly, at some point you will create some opponents. It’s natural, don’t be upset. Don’t get nervous. Don’t panic. Go on and do your job as usual.

Comments Policy

A blog is about interaction more than it is about broadcasting. The huge success of this phenomenon is due exactly to this part. Traditional media is a one way communication process. Blogging (and social media) is a two way communication process. Your readers can openly state their opinions. And that’s a very good thing.

As a general rule, I think you should keep your blog open to comments. And to answer to as many comments as you can, if possibly, to all. There will be milestones when you could get rid of the comments, but only in some special contexts, I’ll talk about them in a second. In the beginning, you should keep your blog open. And pray for some comments, too. Answer to them carefully, even if the are just short sentences like: “nice post, I like it”. Just say “thank you”. Answer to them even if they are (or especially if they are) negative comments. Try to find out why they are negative. In other words, don’t get offensive or defensive. Try to start an interaction.

From a certain level, managing comments could become harder than maintaining the blog. Especially if you get 50-60 comments per post or more. From this level up, I think you could update your comment policy. You can gradually go to answer only to certain comments, and then you can leave your readers only share their opinions or discuss. Some of the most popular bloggers found an interesting way to keep the interaction going on, while getting rid of the chore of maintaining or answering to hundreds of comments for every post: they created special forums. On these forums people will still have a chance to make their opinion heard, but it will be a much more open discussion space. I think Steve Pavlina did that a couple of years ago, and also Leo Babauta did that recently.

Email Strategy

A good part of your interaction will be hidden from your blog. Namely, you will be contacted directly, most of the time by email. You should have a strategy for answering emails as well. Some people think that because of the private nature of this communication channel, it wouldn’t count as much as comments and tend to be a little lazy when it comes to email, or even ignore it completely. I think this is a mistake. Not only it will create a (maybe false) image of an isolated individual, but it will make people reluctant to get in touch with you in the future.

Almost my entire business communication related to my blog is done by email. I couldn’t imagine how I could create some revenue with my blog without creating a more personal approach with my audience. Some of my readers become my blog business partners and I become a blog business partner for some of the blogs I follow. Not having a proper email strategy in place will create a serious financial handicap in the long run. Seems hard to believe but it’s real.

I usually receive three types of emails: people are asking for advice, people are asking for business opportunities and people are just telling me that my blog helped them. Didn’t got any angry email so far, but there’s time. And I have patience . I had my share of online hatred and irony, mostly from Romanian bloggers, but no direct email so far. Anyway, my email strategy goes like this: if I can give advice, I give it within the time frame of a week. If I can’t, I refuse politely, usually in a day or two. If the business opportunity looks interesting, I follow up. A few of my most profitable affiliate deals were created as a result of some long email discussions.

Social Media Strategy

I said it before, I’ll say it again: your blog goes beyond your blog. You’re not having only a single outlet, you have access to a lot of streams which can carry and deliver your message pretty fast to a huge audience. And that’s social media. In my experience, as a blogger, there are only a few places which can be of interest: twitter, Facebook, StmbleUpon (since I already talked extensively about StumbleUpon before, and since SU is mainly a promotion outlet, I won’t talk about it in this post, feel free to check out this post: The First Six Months Of Blogging – Promotion) Some people may have had good results using digg or reddit or delicious. I had a few myself, but not enough to draw some clear conclusions or to create some  repetitive processes out of them.

From a reputation point of view, being at least on the most popular social media networks is a must. People are hanging out there. And they will expect to find interesting people there. It’s like everybody hang out in the big cities and if you chose to isolate yourself in the countryside, it will take a while to make those big city guys know that you’re around. You may still do it, but you’ll have to shout a little louder.

Twitter

It’s a “hit and run” network. It has a very good link generation potential, and it can also act like a reputation enhancer. Your followers can act like broadcaster for you, transporting your message to their followers and so on. A few people told me they discovered me not through Google or direct recommendation, but by Twitter. The structure of this network will make it very easy to propagate your message to a potentially very big audience, very fast.

But it has a few downsides too. Being so fast, it means others are waiting for their messages to be delivered too. Your message will get out of focus almost instantly. If you’re not “floating”, meaning if you’re not generating enough retweeting activity, your links, after a 5-10 minutes spike, will become almost dead. The biggest interaction happens in the first 5-10 minutes on Twitter.

This “floating” can happen in a lot of ways and I don’t think this is the time and place in this post to cover all of them. The most common situations are: your tweet has been retweeted by an influencer (an influencer is a twitter person with at least a few tens of thousands of followers), you have a very big audience (hard to believe it will happen in the beginning) or you just got lucky, creating some very powerful viral content. I’ve experienced the first and the last of these situations quite often, especially the last one. There are few posts which are still retweeted daily even after a year: 100 Ways To Live A Better Life.

How do you create reputation on Twitter with your blog? Well, first of all, maintain a clear profile. Create and maintain a twitter landing page. Tweet your posts. Engage in conversations if people are asking you. Tweet other, non-blog related, stuff. People will know that you’re real and not a WordPress plugin. Create interactions.

Facebook

It’s a place for human interaction rather than link sharing. In this respect it’s more human than Twitter, but it’s also more picky. Building a strong presence on Facebook will ensure a constant (albeit small) flow of links. If you get links from Facebook, you can be sure that those who shared those links are really enjoying your content. There is no reciprocal “pay-off” for sharing, as it may be in Twitter, when reteweeting is often a currency for supporting each other.

I admit I didn’t do much of an effort to create a Facebook presence, other than placing a link to my Facebook profile on my blog sidebars. And yet, I get friendship requests on a daily basis. Many of these friendship requests are generated by my blog. In fact, almost all the requests are generated by my blog.

Being mostly centered around relationships, Facebook will be a nice place to hang out with like-minded people, chat, exchange ideas or just seeing other people lives unfolding in front of you. If you got an organic Facebook audience, I guess the most important thing is to be consistent. Sharing stuff on your wall which has little or no connection with your blog will dazzle your audience (I did it a few times and it does ).

Why Is This Important And What Are The Benefits

Direct interaction with your audience is a great gift. You have instant access to what people really like or dislike about you or your work. You know immediately if you did a blunder or if you hit it big. And you have a chance to meet a lot of people in real life. I personally met a few bloggers I respect while I was traveling last year and it was a fantastic experience.

Reputation is not something you carry on yourself, show it to somebody and they will recognize it. It doesn’t work like this. Reputation is in fact created and maintained by your audience. You may brag about how good and skilled you are as much as you want, if other people won’t agree with what you say, it will mean nothing.

So, if you really wanna know if you have built reputation don’t look in the mirror, don’t re-read your blog posts, don’t get out in the front of your house and shout out from the top of your lungs: “I’m the best guy in my field!”.

Just look at your audience.  Your readers will never lie to you.

Don’t Spend Your Money Buying Friends

This is a guest post from Zoli Cerei from SimplyWillDo.com.

The recession or, speaking a bit more generally, a lack of money shouldn’t cut down on your social life. We have to be aware of the correlation between our financial and social status, and have to learn to separate these. This coin has two sides: those who are financially strong enough may end up “buying” friends and later feeling insecure about them and question themselves whether they can count on these people, or not. The opposite is when those financially unstable don’t have the confidence to build a social circle because they fear uncomfortable situations caused by money.

A modern day manifestation of this issue is the exchange of internet friend for money. You might have also faced this, it is basically just another kind of advertising: this time what you pay for are Facebook friends or Twitter followers. Were these sites meant for that to happen really?

Friends, Money and Giving Value In Real Life

Be respectable by respecting others. Everyone shares human values of high standards, and if you want to observe this just a little, you will. Once you start respecting these values, others will appreciate the gesture, and respect you in return. Respect doesn’t have to be material, an honest compliment, a helpful movement but even powerful constructive criticism can mean a lot to the other one.

Be friendly, because that’s the best way to actually make… friends. Too many people fear kindness. Kindness is in a way revealing yourself to someone else, showing something from the inside of you. Too many people fear responsibility, since when you’re taking responsibility for something, then you become accountable for that thing. Too many people fear saying their opinion out loud: if your opinion is no longer concealed, you may too be criticized. Friendships involve all of these: being friendly means being nice and kind to your friend. It also means taking responsibility for them and for you as well. It means undertaking your opinion, and saying it honestly even if it is negative at times. Too many people fear being friendly, because it is not always easy, no one said it is. But it’s obviously the best way to make friends.

Be a loyal friend in happiness and in sorrow, too. I observed that, contrary to the saying, a friend in need and sorrow isn’t always a friend indeed. Rather, a friend in joy is. While being next to someone when he is going through hard times you might even comfort yourself observing that you are actually in a better situation. However, when your friend has just accomplished one of their dreams, it is usually harder to honestly be happy about the situation.

Realize you can’t be friends with everyone. While you can buy everyone a beer at the party, and that might make everyone feel good, you can’t actually be friends with everyone. There are people who you don’t name as your best friend; however, you would like them to call you their best friend. Is that fair? Being best friends is mutual.

The depth of online friendships, or buying Twitter followers

Provide Great Content. This is the first step to any relationship, and not just online. You provide something that others like and that they would like to receive more often. In the online world, that’s the moment when they hit the “Follow” or the “Subscribe” button. Whatever you’re doing on the internet, keep an eye on providing something useful to the online society, and others will notice you.

Make Your Voice Heard. Engage with others. Replying to tweets and leaving comments can be at times as useful as it is to buy an advertising spot, and it costs nothing. Today, the web is “social”, and as I said, being social is by far not equal to being rich. Show you’re a human, not just a bank account. Engage.

Be honest. Don’t call everyone your friend after the click of a button. That’s something that really annoys me in the case of social networks: relationships are instantly branded as friendships. Making friends online is possible; however, just as it is in real life, it is a process. A relationship goes through several phases until it can be called a friendship, just like you don’t go to bed on a first date. If you have not yet gone through this process with someone, don’t call them a friend yet.

Conclusion

Money is a powerful tool in our lives and using it wisely is an unquestionable power of any man or woman. Money can buy you medicine, it cannot buy your health. It can buy you sex, but not love. It can buy company but not friends. Showing human values and respecting your fellows, however, will surely turn into great experiences.

About the author: Zoli Cserei is a very young simplicity and productivity blogger and an ever-curious hacker of life who writes for Simply Will Do. Check out his blog to see whether he has some useful stuff for you or maybe subscribe to his RSS feed for more.

The 30 Secret Rules of Social Media

Every now and then I try to relax and look at see things from a different perspective. A few months ago, I imagined a world formed by social networks, each network being a country (if you think a little, the total population of those social networks could easily be higher than the population of an entire continent, so it’s not that strange anyway). But no country is a real country until it has a set of secret rules. Here are the 30 secret rules of social media (take them with a little bit of salt and pay attention to the last one, especially ).

Twitter

1. You are what you retweet.

2. Don’t DM without permission. It’s like trying to sell elephants in a porcelain store. Your goal may be achieved, but the price may be higher than you think.

3. If you tweet more than 8-9 times per day, your followers will be worried. It’s like getting out in front of your house and saying: “man what a nice weather today” 8-9 times a day. Your neighbors will be worried.

4. Don’t trust a follower with a nice woman picture as an avatar but with a nickname containing more than 4 digits. The photo is most likely a fake and you’re dealing with a nice looking spammer.

5. If you stop tweeting for 7 days in a row you should get yourself another account, your current one will be officially marked as obsolete.

6. If you see the fail whale, do continue to tweet on post-its. Don’t lose your momentum. Stick them on the walls of your office.

7. If you appear in more lists than the total number of your followers, that could be a pretty solid confirmation that you have a multiple personality disorder.

8. You know you had too much Twitter when you’re looking for the “follow” link on the business card you just received.

9. Automating your tweets is like sending clones to the social events you don’t like. Sooner or later, they will catch you.

StumbleUpon

10. Laws are changing every day in this country. Your friends are not your friends but your subscribers, which in turn may or may not be you visitors.

11. Stumbling is actually highly valued in this country. But do not fake it. Try to genuinely stumble otherwise you can be accused of inappropriate behavior in public.

12. StumbleUpon is the Hollywood of social media: it can make you famous in a single day, but you can also be forgotten in a week.

13. According to a number of experts, the SU toolbar could be the most widely used mouse click exercise on Earth. Emptying your SU bar from 100 shares in 10 seconds is considered pretty common sense. If you don’t know what a toolbar is, or what a share means in SU, then, by all means, don’t try to find out. Just stay happy.

Reddit

14. If they talk bad about you, don’t talk bad back. It’s not polite. Being talked bad in Reddit is a sign of high appreciation. Sometimes is a sign of pure rejection too.

15. Ask a question at least once per month. Don’t pick a specific topic, be as random as you can but do ask a question ever once in a while. Asking questions in Reddit is like drinking beer in Germany.

16. Starting your own subReddit is the equivalent of graduation. Everybody does it, sooner or later.

17. In Reddit, you actually accumulate karma, you don’t burn it. You’ve been warned.

Digg

18. If your link got buried, be happy. It’s the first sign you’re becoming important.

19. In Digg, who you are as a person is not even remotely as valuable as who you know. I also saw that in business. A lot.

20. Reaching the front page of Digg is equivalent in some cultures with winning the lottery. The probability, I mean.

21. If you get comments on your submissions, but no diggs, you’re doing something extremely wrong. Nobody will tell you exactly what, get used to it.

22. There’s no real difference between friends and fans: both can bury you alive.

Facebook

23. If you want to say something nice to some of your friends, think twice, there might be an app for that.

24. There will always be some causes to join at some point in your life, so don’t rush on the first one.

25. Farmville is a very crowded city in Facebook. Rumors has it that some people who entered Farmville never got back from it.

26. If someone likes your link that doesn’t mean you have to automatically invite him/her on a date.

27. You will receive crazy, totally useless, nice looking small gifts. Get used to it. It’s not spam. It’s gifts.

28. It’s compulsory to have your own fan page. If you don’t, people will assume you want to become somebody else’s fan and act accordingly.

29. Never respond to a message that says: “You have just been accepted in Mafia Wars”. Real mobsters don’t do that. They send someone over.

The Final Rule

30. If you’ve read everything on this list and agreed with at least 50% of what’s in it, you badly need a life. A real life.

Twitter versus Facebook

In the last 5 years, the most important digital places I spend time in are Twitter and Facebook. Surprisingly enough, they seem to be the most popular social networking sites too. Recently, I had a short morning conversation on Twitter with one of my followers about what  question these sites are answering. What is the reason Twitter and Facebook exists, after all? The following post was born out of this interaction.

Twitter and Facebook Question

The Twitter question is undoubtly: “What are you doing?”. As simple and dumb as it seems it responds to a fundamental need of human beings:  curiosity. It may have killed the cat, but made the humans happy too in the process, that’s for sure. A part for answering this question, Twitter is not doing more. I’m reading this, I’m cooking dinner, I’m hanging out with friends, these are typical Twitter actions. Sometimes, a conversation can last for hours, sometimes it ends in a tweet.

The Facebook question poses a little bit of difficulty, but in the end I think this is: “What are you up to?”. In the beginning, Facebook was just a place to keep in touch with friends, sort of a digital address book. In the last 2-3 years, the increased interactivity, fueled by a wave of new apps built on top of their API made Facebook more of  an entertainment place in which you are invited to play. Games, interactions or causes, all are sharing a subtle entertaining vibe on Facebook.

API Usage

Twitter is giving an API for creating different clients for the same environment. You can access the same rules, via a different skin or device.

Facebook is giving an API for creating different meta-environments. You can create your own rules, and engage users in a different, sometimes totally unexpected type of interaction.

General Context

Twitter keeps the context fixed, while Facebook changes the context frequently. That means, Twitter has a limited set of features, which remained fixed for a long time. The learning curve is faster than on Facebook, because of this simplicity. On Twitter you can focus only on interaction, on Facebook you keep focusing on adapting to the environment.

On Twitter you reach out to people, on Facebook you reach out to challenges, apps and complex interactions. Reaching out to people is spontaneous, unexpected and builds up social skills. Reaching out to challenges and complex logical interactions builds up intellectual skills. While they are surely more engaged than usual Twitter users, typical Facebook users are not as social as you would think they are. The abundance of social tools (poking, commenting on walls, liking, etc) masks the genuine message.

Adapting to a difficult environment is clearly one the most important evolution processes. While Twitter maintains a rather loose environment with fewer rules, Facebook is constantly loading it with new restrictions. Coping with every new change and improvement in FaceBook frustrates users but at the same time is making them stronger. On Twitter, the only challenge must come from within, there is only the internal motivation: to manage an increasing number of connections in small, standardized chunks of actions. Facebook users may become stronger but their social motivation needs constant challenge. Twitter users are building up social skills in a more natural way.

A typical Facebook user is a little more stressed than a typical Twitter user. He knows he have to cope with a new challenge at any given moment: being it a new environment rule (like tagging users or changing the look of the feeds or of the site) or being it a new gift or other request he receives from a new app. It’s like being prepared to face a new threat every second. It surely makes them more powerful but I don’t know if it’s making them enjoy their presence more.

A typical Twitter user is most of the time concerned only with his incoming or outgoing interactions. He can chose the level of those interactions by limiting or expanding the number of users he follows. He has a greater control of the game than a Facebook user, who, regardless of the number of friends, is exposed to an increasing number of stimuli. A Twitter user usually enjoy his presence or at least is constantly refining his game in order to enjoy his presence more.

Social Media Vocabulary

By “vocabulary” in social media I understand the interaction units. In a language you have words as interaction units, in a social media site you have a set of actions by which you can play that specific role.

On Twitter you have a limited and pretty much standardized vocabulary: tweets, replies and direct messages. You can post links and that’s that.

On Facebook, you have a virtually unlimited vocabulary. You can express with hundreds (if not thousands) of apps, you can play Farmville or Mafia Wars, you can write on walls, poke, or become a fan.

Usually, languages with a simpler vocabulary tends to become more popular. English surpassed French during the 20th century as an international language, partly because it has a simpler vocabulary.

Twitter or Facebook?

I favor simplicity in face of complexity. In my opinion, if it keeps the actual strategy, Twitter has a bigger evolution potential because it has fewer rules to be followed. It’s a simpler, much robust digital organism. Facebook is like a wrestler on steroids: impressive, hugely complex but ready to crush at any given moment. Its complexity is becoming its heavier burden.

I think in the long term the stake will move from adapting to a complex environment (Facebook) to adapting to a complex stream of interactions (Twitter). We, humans, are already incredibly complicated machines, we don’t need to create another hugely complicated environment to adapt more. What we need is to interact more, to create around us a new social model. In this regard, Twitter allows a bigger freedom and the human interaction throughput is higher in Twitter.

FaceBook keeps the game closed. The rules are changing and they are seldom changing by popular request, on the contrary. Facebook may succeed in creating a challenging environment, like a huge amusement park, where you want to go every once in a while for some thrills, but you can’t live your real life in an amusement park. Real life is outside an amusement park, real life is made of simple human interaction, of spontaneity and unexpected. I like a roller-coaster every now and then, but I can’t work and become useful in a roller-coaster.

For me, Twitter is Auckland, Facebook is Las Vegas.

The First Year Of Blogging – Promotion

Welcome to the 2nd post in the series about my first year blogging as a business. Today will talk about blog promotion. Since this is a rather lengthy subject and there are week-long events only one this topic alone, without further ado, let’s get started.

Domain Change

The most important change in my promoting activities was changing the domain name. I went from a “.ro” based domain to a “.com”. I hesitated a few months before doing this and the main reason was how will I migrate legacy traffic from the “.ro” domain to the new one. I had a lot of pages bookmarked, a lot of inbound links and all of that could have been lost in case of a domain change.

3 months ago I decided to bite the bullet and did the change. I put a simple 301 redirect on the old blog  which basically directed all the incoming traffic (including page names) to my new domain. Didn’t changed anything in my permalinks structure so everything was expected to work fine. Of course, it didn’t.

The first consequence was that all my StumbleUpon traffic was suddenly lost. I learned the hard way that StumbleUpon doesn’t honor the 301 redirect code, showing a redirected site practically dead. Although the domain was properly changed and the 301 redirect code was working as expected, for some reason SU didn’t take this into account and showed the site as unavailable. Everything was confirmed by a SU representative after we changed a few emails on this topic.

In a hurry, I decided I have to come up with a workaround. Before that, let me tell you that although I had a decent 3 PageRank on the old domain, I didn’t get more than 10% of traffic form search engines. Around 90% of my traffic came from social media and direct bookmarks. At that time I thought this was because I was blogging in English and the domain was treated as a Romanian one. So, somehow, I was in between search engines, not getting much traffic from either Ro or En based indexes. Time proved I was right.

But right after the change I was in the middle of a small crisis. There was a trade off: how much search engine traffic would I sacrifice in order to keep my social media traffic at the same level? In other words, if I would still keep the old domain up, risking duplicate content penalties from Google, how much traffic would I lose/gain? The answer was pretty simple: at a 90/10 ratio, I gladly sacrificed my search engine traffic. I left the old domain up and did a somehow dirty workaround: 3 seconds after loading the page the user was redirected to the page on the new domain. For the humans this was almost transparent, just a change in the address bar of the browser. For the StumbleUpon bots it was like finding an old shipwreck: my old site with all the bookmarks and incoming traffic. It worked. All my incoming traffic from SU was up again and, surprisingly, my search engine traffic stopped at a decent 10%. Same as before. Weird, I know.

After 3 months I decided it’s time to let the old site die, because in the meantime I was able to gather enough new traffic and reverted to a 301 redirect. Basically, SU sees my old site dead again. But the new site is already having a lot of high quality traffic, so this is not a problem anymore.

Lessons: first of all, not all the major social media sites are honoring redirects, so you have to be very careful with that. If you base your traffic on only one major social media it will make you really vulnerable in the medium to long term. Second: the “.com” domains are definitely having priority in front of regional domains when it comes to English content. So, a “.com” domain is a must and it hugely impact your traffic.

Benefits: I learned a lot about how social media works, how you can leverage it for traffic and how you can transfer this traffic to new domains. But above all, my traffic burst was one of the biggest since I started to blog. Basically, changing the domain only tripled my traffic.

Search Engine Optimization

I do write with search engines in mind. Meaning I pay decent attention to the keyword distribution, to inbound and outbound links and to headings. In a rather mysterious way, this seems to pay off, although I didn’t get any PageRank whatsoever on my new domain. It takes a while until Google assigns a PR to a new domain, so I’m patient. Usually this is happening after 3-4 months, so I’m pretty close. Probably having a penalty for duplicate content could have made things even slower, so I might wait even more. Anyway, the bottom line is that I’m still having some search engine optimization thrills every now and then.

One of these thrills is the fact that I rank #1 in Google for being successful (or at least I do this at the moment of writing this article). I tried the search in the “.ro” index of Google and got myself in the 4th position. Umm, exactly what I’ve told you, there IS a difference.

Another interesting SEO fact is related to one of the most popular posts I had: 100 Ways To Live A Better Life. Several hours after I hit “publish” the post got featured in all major social media sites: StumbleUpon, Delicious or Reddit. But at the same time it was climbing pretty fast in Google’s index. So now I am also on the #1 position for this phrase “100 ways to live a better life” out of more than 72.000.000 of searches. And that is for a domain which still hasn’t got a PR.

And the last interesting SEO fact is related to my ebook “30 Sentences For A Millionaire Mindset”. In hours after I wrote the launch post, it was retweeted pretty hard and also got mentioned on other blogs. Making the ebook available through an affiliate program could have helped this fast link distribution. Fact is that less then a week after the launch, my ebook is also in the first page of Google for the “millionaire mindset” search. It seems the results for this search are one of the most volatile on the internet, they change extremely often, even several times a day. Either a lot of people already found this mindset, either a lot of people are still looking for it in various ways. Reading my ebook might help the last ones.

Lesson: even if you get the vast majority of your traffic from social media, search engine optimization still pays off. It’s just residual, effortless traffic that flows in without any hidden costs, so writing with SEO in mind is a must, regardless of your current PR.

Benefits: I’m ranking pretty well for a number of strategic keywords but I don’t see how much of the related search engine traffic I really get. When I’ll have my PR assigned I will certainly know more, for now, I’m just enjoying the mild, constant and free SEO traffic I get every day.

Twitter

Nothing changed significantly in my social networking approach, a part from Twitter. So, I’m going to talk a little bit about how I use Twitter for blog promotion. As we will see, “blog promotion” is a rather foggy term, as I use Twitter for a lot more stuff, which of course includes blog promotion too.

All the “twitter promotion” I do for my blog is to post on Twitter minutes I publish a post. I do it manually for now, I used to have a plugin which automated this for me, but for some reasons I want to do it manually each time. One of these reasons is that I use a specific URL shortener, su.pr. And the reason I use su.pr is because it plays extremely nice with my StumbleUpon account and can provide some interesting information. For instance, some posts are doing extremely well on Twitter but not so good on SU and vice versa. I can see that instantly on su.pr.

After announcing the blog post is out, I usually do a 24 hours later recall. I just let people know that I wrote something the other day and maybe they have missed it. That’s it. But the real action starts when I’m starting to monitor the retweets. I’m using a tool called topsy, which seems to work pretty good. I can see all the retweets for my blog posts, the time when they were posted and who retweeted it. Topsy have an algorithm to determine if the twitterer is a normal, influential or highly influential person on Twitter. That’s something. The algorithm is pretty basic, but it does work.

Now, every time I see I got retweeted by an influential or highly influential twitterer I visit his/her profile and do a basic check. If there’s some vibe, I follow. If not, I thank you politely for the retweet and move on. Almost every time after I follow an influential or highly influential person (as a result of having my blog post retweeted by them) I get followed back. Now, how this is helping my blog promotion?

Next time I post something on Twitter they will see. And chances that they will like the content are pretty high so I’m going to get another retweet. It’s like creating a pool of Twitter subscribers. Not to mention the benefit of getting in touch with highly visible and, most of the time, really nice persons.  This blog promotion is far more subtle than any other brute force attempt, but all I can say is that is really, really working. For instance, once of my posts was retweeted more than 600 times. Now combine the audience of this tweets and see the exposure. Translating this into cost per mille or even cost per click is already making me dizzy.

Lesson: Twitter is far more than a time waster, it’s a real tool. And like any other tool its force stays in the hand of the beholder. Enlarging my Twitter network based on the mutual preferences and on the fact that I follow only after a first step the other guys does is really working. It’s like waiting a little bit and see if we do share the same vibe until I made the step of actually interacting.

Benefits: Twitter is my second traffic generator now. But the traffic is small compared with the other benefits, like discovering new people and getting in line for new opportunities. Like I said, blog promotion is only one thing I do on Twitter, other important activities there being personal branding and opportunities hunting.

Writing Good Content

This is by far the most important blog promotion tool. Some people call it word of mouth. Some people call it intuition or hunch. Having that subtle understanding of what people need to read and delivering that to them. I call it work. Every time I do my work fine, the blog posts are flying like hotcakes on delicious, reddit, StumbleUpon or you name it.

There is this magic threshold after which your readers are becoming your promoters. There’s an edge after which your consumers are becoming your fans, your advertisers. This is what makes the difference between a great blog and a correct blog. The correct blog will work as expected, but a great blog will break the rules, the boundaries, the limits. Even if the sky is the limit.

This magic happens once you really touch something in your readers. Once you have the power to reach to them, see their problem and give them a good advice. Or at least a decent suggestion. Or a drop of inspiration. Or some simple motivation. But give them something. And they will give back thousand times what you offered.

Lesson: be useful.

Benefits: they’ll be useful to you.

I’m A Twitter Citizen, Work In StumbleUpon, Occasionally Travel To Reddit

Last month StumbleUpon had around 7 million registered users. Twitter is coming up pretty close, with around 4 million registered users, while Facebook watches all this from a distance, with more than 200 millions registered users. Why are those numbers important, apart from dry media statistics? Because they are not just numbers, they represent populations.

One of the most surprising and most important effects of social networking is the creation of a new type of country. A country which is not defined by physical borders, but by domain names. A country which is ruled by Terms Of Service, and not Constitutions. A type of country which, in some cases, is far more rich than most of the traditional, physical bordered countries.

If you’re surprised by these affirmations is good. It means you are from the old fashioned generation which thought email is the final frontier. If you’re not surprised, I bet you are one of the happy citizens of those new countries. You are already an active member of that population and help the economical growth of that specific country.

Well, for those still surprised, I will try to uncover in this article why and how the social media is shaping the new digital-political structure of the world, the structure that will overlap in the end the familiar geo-political structure.

Traditional And Digital Countries

A traditional country model is defined by borders, physical borders. A citizenship is defined by a special identification document, by which you are recognized. The traditional model of a country is territorial. You can’t really DO something outside the physical borders and your citizenship. The value is defined inside a territory, where there is a currency which you can trade for value. A traditional country is defined by fixed factors, like geography.

On the other hand, the digital countries are defined by interactions. Your citizenship is your username. In the Amazon country, you interact by buying things. In the eBay country you can do even more, you can sell your stuff too. And in the Monster country you can hunt for a job. All of these are interactions. And all digital countries are defined by interaction, instead of physical borders. Interactions performed over the internet. (more…)

The First 6 Months Of Blogging – Promotion

The first 6 months of serious blogging are crucial. In today’s post I’ll share my experiences with one of the most ignored activities by the beginners, and that would be promotion. This is the second post from a bigger series, so I recommend you to read the introductory post, if you came here directly. If you want to know more about the first post in the series, you can go to The First 6 Months Of Blogging – Writing. And keep in mind that this post is also pretty big, over 2000 words, so you’d better book some free time to read it at ease.

Broadcast Your Message

Promotion accounts for at least 40%-45% of the overall time I spend “blogging”. If this sounds surprising, I must confess that I feel I’m not promoting this blog as I should. I feel I’m not doing enough for it.

I cannot stress enough the importance of promotion in the early months. As always, I learned this the hard way, from experience. In the first 3 months, my traffic was constant, but low. Shamefully low, as opposed to my expectations. The vast majority of traffic came from search engines and since the blog didn’t had a significant number of inbound links, my page rank was low. It still is, by the way, only this doesn’t matter now anymore.

Here’s my traffic breakdown for the first 3 months:

Search Engines – 58%
Referring sites – 28%
Direct traffic – 14%

During the first 3 months I didn’t do anything to promote this blog. I waited to be picked up by search engines. It happened sooner than I thought, only the traffic I received was extremely low. I was indexed almost instantly but the traffic was not as expected.

So, after 3 months of stagnation I decided it was time to actively involve myself in promoting this blog. I realized something extremely important: the world of blogging is really crowded. There are literally millions of blogs out there. Tens of millions. The vast majority are low quality, it’s true, but even if we accept that 1% of the blogs are really good, 1% of 50.000.000 of blogs is 500.000. You have an enormous competition: 500.000 sites! If you have a little bit of decency you realize that you really cannot wait for the search engines to pick you up and send you in the first place. You can’t afford to do that. You have to actually control the process. At least until you can automate some parts of it and assess some progress. If you do nothing to promote your blog, your chances for a steady, growing traffic are extremely low. You act on a field with enormous numbers.

So, after I started to actively work on my blog promotion, my traffic breakdown changed dramatically in the last 3 months. Here’s how: (more…)

Twitter Downshifting

Three weeks ago I deleted my first twitter account @edragonu. At that time I had more than 1000 followers and I followed around 800 people. After a few days of silence, I decided to restart my twitter experience, on another account, @dragosroua, which happens to be me real name. I restored the first account but let my followers know that I’m on a new account and invited them to follow me there. During that silence period I learned a lot about how Twitter works and about myself. Here’s what happened.

Real Followers On Twitter

After I announced that I switched accounts, I experienced a flood of new followers on the new account. Those were the real followers, the ones who were listening and had a real interest in follow me. In 2-3 days I went from 0 to 100 followers. And then it slowly started to stop. I have around 1-2 new followers per day right now.

As you can see, the “core” of the followers was less than 10% of my actual numbers. Out of 1000 listed followers, only 100 were actually listening to my tweets and were interested in following me. It’s a little bit sad. And also unexpected. I was convinced that my followers are interested in what I write. At least, I was interested in what people I followed wrote.

Fewer Followers, Better Experience

The feeling I had in the first few days of having only meaningful followers were terrific. And I still experience the same feelings now. I feel relieved, authentic, useful and true. No more dumb numbers chasing, no more empty performance metrics, just authentic interaction.

I used to spend around 2-3 hours each day only in reading my timeline. I had to find ways to filter the content and cut down the noise. Somehow I took for granted that “noise” is something that Twitter has by default and I have to get over it. After I started the new account it was like the noise never existed.

Twitter doesn’t have any associated noise, it’s you who create the noise, by succumbing to the numbers game. (more…)

The Gratitude Experiment

The experiment is out and running, check out the new page listing the last 20 tweets tagged #gratitude on twitter.

It’s funny how a certain path we chose leads us to realms we never knew to exist. Or puts us on roads far more adventurous or enriching than we thought. In today’s post I’ll share one of those twisted yet so rewarding situations in which a certain path lead me to another, much deeper one.

The iPhone Situation

I can say in all truth that I’m using an iPhone even since before it was launched. One of the most read posts on my blog is about iPhone and GTD – total black belt productivity, a post featured on the official forums of David Allen company. That post was written weeks before the launch of the iPhone. What can I say: it’s a useful device which combines my needs for communication in one little tool.

But I use my iPhone for much more than communication. In a post about Law Of Attraction and Action I gently let you know that I exercised with the Law Of Attraction by using my iPhone. It was a very simple exercise: I set up reminders in the calendars with my goals and took time to read them and interiorize them. I kept this habit for several months and of course, it worked. I also used my iPhone for getting in touch with my Personal Mission Statement, another interesting exercise which I am still using. (more…)

Twitter Landing Page

There’s no secret I used (and talked about) Twitter a lot lately. I already wrote several posts about it this month, from Twiterring Heights, up to Taxonomic Twitter. I use Twitter for much more than answering to the question “what are you doing?”. I use this social service mostly to connect with other interesting people and it seems Twitter is a fantastic resource for that.

This week I decided that I should have a “twitter landing page”. A “twitter landing page” is usually a web page linked to your twitter account. If other Twitter users are curious about you, or intend to follow, you can now present them a customized version of yourself.

One should argue that a link to your blog is enough. Well, maybe. I guess it all depends on how and why are you using Twitter. If you’re interested in offering to your potential followers first hand information about yourself, than a special crafted landing page is a must. If you’re only scratching the surface on Twitter, your blog should be enough for now.

So, here it is, my brand new twitter landing page. This is what a person who clicks on my Twitter profile link will see.

I wanted to keep it simple and offer as much information as I can, while still trying to keep it under 500 words. I know I succeeded on the words number part, because it has 457 words, I checked. If I gave enough information about me, well, that’s something I should find out soon.

There are still some questions left for me and I would love to hear from you:

1. One rule about twitter landing pages states that they shouldn’t have any outbound links. Mine has, and I think it’s ok, what’s your opinion on that?
2. Do you think you should have a photo of yourself in the twitter landing page? I do, and I also think it’s ok, what do you think?

If you want to know more abut twitter landing pages, this article from problogger (from which I was inspired, by the way) gives you several answers. And you can get some really interesting live previews about what’s on Twitter related to this subject by doing this twitter search.

Getting The Best Out Of Twitter – Introducing MrTweet

My Twitter mood is continuing these days. After a general post about twittering heights and a more technical one about hashtags in Twitter, today I’ll write a short review of one of the most useful applications you can try to enhance your Twitter experience.

The application is web-based and you can find it at mrtweet.net. MrTweet offers two simple, yet powerful features so far – the app is very young, 4 weeks at the date of this post, if I’m not wrong – and those are

• listings of your followers that you should follow back
• listings of the key influencers in your network

In order to measure the quality of the followers you should follow back and to define the “influencer” MrTweet uses a few ad-hoc metrics.  Based on what you already have in your network of followers, MrTweet will harvest a report, in fact, just a simple list. The report shows near each person their ratio of following / frollower, the number of tweets per day and the recipricity: how that person replies or not to non-follows. On top of that, it shows a list of the persons in your network who are already following that person, and, if you really want to know more, it also shows you the latest tweets of that person in your browser. And of course, if you like the guy, you can follow him on Twitter from within MrTweet website. (more…)