A few months ago I posted a list of 10 excellent niche social news sites. I've been updating the categorized list of social media sites tonight and thought I'd point out 7 noteworthy new additions to the list.
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On the subject of social media marketing you'll often read that it's important to be an active part of the social community and to work on building a strong profile for yourself. Sometimes it's assumed by those who are new to social media that the primary or sole reason for this is to submit or vote for your own content. While this can be one reason for building a profile, it's far from the only benefit. In this post I'd like to take a look at 9 potential reasons to build your profile. It's unlikely that all will apply to you, but hopefully when looking over this list you'll see that a strong profile can be beneficial for a number of reasons. Read More »
Many bloggers have dreams of becoming a full-time blogger so they can quit their jobs and work around their own schedule on something that they will will enjoy. Of course, the reality is that only a very small percentage of those who start off with these intentions will ever achieve "pro blogger" status. In order to make it to the point where you can sustain yourself on just a blogging income, you'll first have to get started somewhere. Building a successful and profitable blog part-time can be a real challenge, but with a strategic plan and a lot of discipline you can certainly build a blog on a part-time basis that can do very well for you financially. Read More »
Most blogs today are monetized either in full or in part by banner advertisements. Bloggers who sell banner ads have a lot of options in terms of marketplaces and ad servers. I started selling ads on my primary blog at the start of 2008 by simply hand coding the advertisers into my sidebar and changing them manually each month. While ... Read More »
For bloggers and social media marketers, the desire to increase numbers of unique visitors to a site often overshadows an effort to increase the average number of pageviews per visitor. For those who are getting a high percentage of visitors via social media sites, convincing visitors to view multiple pages is sometimes seen as a lost cause. In reality, the blogger and the designer do have some influence on visitors in terms of encouraging extended visits, and even a small increase in average pageviews per visitor can result in significant gains in overall pageviews. Read More »
ScribeFire Blog Editor There are a number of offline blog editors that work with the major blogging platforms, but if you're looking for a blog editor to use from inside Firefox, give ScribeFire a try.
"ScribeFire is a full-featured blog editor that integrates with your browser and lets you easily post to your blog. You can drag and drop formatted text from pages you are browsing, take notes, upload images, and post to multiple blogs."Read More »
About six months ago I published a post here called Search Engine Traffic and New Blogs, which basically laid out my approach for building organic search traffic at Vandelay Design. At that time the blog was roughly a year old (although only "active" for about 8 months) and it had just drawn 17,000 search visitors in one month, which was by far a record month for the site. Since then the amount of search traffic has continued to rise steadily and it's helped me to observe some things about blogging along the way. Read More »
Without a standout idea and content, success can be achieved with social media to a certain degree. You may be able to get enough votes from readers or from a big network of friends that you can ask for votes, but only those with the best ideas and excellent execution will truly have a viral impact.There are a number of different factors that are involved in a social media campaign (content, network, targeted sites, timing, etc.) that will influence its level of success, but idea development cannot be overlooked as a major contributor. Read More »
Because I write about subjects regarding social media and traffic generation, I get a number of emails from readers and visitors with questions regarding their own lack of success with social media. Several times I received an email stating that they've spent hours and hours working on their site/blog submitting to every social media site imaginable only to get no results, or very disappointing results.I know those that write to me do not represent every blogger and social media user, but I also know that there are plenty of others out there in similar situations. The problem is all in the approach. I did some consulting a while back for a client that claimed to have read every article and ebook about traffic generation, SEO, SMM, etc, all with no results. She was willing to spend money and a lot of time to learn what she needed to do, but that only made her more confused than she was before she started. Read More »
If you're looking to boost the social media traffic that your blog receives, you may want to consider adding a few icons to your favorite social media sites (or more accurately, to those that are relevant to your blog). Here is a brief collection of ten icons sets that feature a number of social media-related icons for your own use.
Web 2.0 Social Bookmark Icons from IconsPedia
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Traffikd Social Media Blog