Posts by Chris:
- Promoting Your Blog Using Social Media, August 25, 2010, Paul Holmes
- Facing Off Facebook, December 20th, 2009, Rhona Bronson
- The Social Media Landscape, December 23, 2009, Sahar Andrade
- Social Media and Professional Services, December 25, 2009, Charlene Burke
- Social Media Plans for the Coming Year, December 30, 2009, Phyllis Zimbler Miller
- A Christmas Party and Facebook Teach Me a Thing or Two About Blogging, January 1, 2010, Doug Stewart
- The Facebook Era: A Practical Guide for Tapping into Social Networks for Business, February 11, 2010, Deni Kasrel
- 10 Ways to Put Your Blog Promotion on Autopilot, February 16, 2010, Michelle Salater
- Harnessing Twitter, Facebook and Your Website to Promote Your Online Business, February 22, 2010, Phyllis Zimbler Miller
- How Do You Set Up a Facebook Fan Page For Your Business?, March 6, 2010, Phyllis Zimbler Miller
- With Facebook so apparently dominant with social networking website users, should the average business person who blogs, and who seeks to utilize social networking sites for marketing purposes, accord Facebook fifty times as much attention as Twitter!?
- Should our Facebook icon be fifty times the size of its Twitter icon?!
- Or should I be looking at Twitter — Britney Spear’s distracting popularity there notwithstanding — as a the communications channel for many deep-thinkers, critics and “influencers” — people who can impact my business positively or negatively in a manner far out of proportion to the 1.14% of social networking views they currently represent?
- “93% of Internet traffic is generated by search engines
- 99% of Internet searchers do not view beyond the top 30 results (first 3 pages in a search results)
- 78% more traffic is received by sites in the first 10 positions (the first page of search results) than those received on the 11th through 30th positions (the 2nd and third pages of search results). “
- Mid-sized businesses with a “middle of the pack” (Thomson’s term) number of Twitter followers
- Twitter itself.
- Keyword Use Anywhere in the Title Tag
- Keyword Use as the First word fo the Title Tag
- Keyword use in the Root Domain
- Existence of Substantive, Unique Content on the Page
- Keyword-Focused Anchor Text From External Links
- External Link Popularity
- Diversity of Link Sources
- Page Specific Trust Rank
- Iterative Algorithm-Based, Global Link Popularity
- Topic Specificity/Focus of External Link Sources
- Keyword Focused Anchor Text from Internal Links
- Google’s explanation of Wave
- Wikipedia on Wave
- Mashable’s ”Complete Guide” to Wave
- Tech Crunch’s more critical take on Wave: “Why Google Wave…”
- FT/techblog: Google Wave “is anti-Web”
Articles On Facebook To Date At “TBB”
March 10th, 2010The following lists articles on Facebook that we at TBB have written in the last 7 months; several of these articles discuss using Facebook, but as part of a larger, cohesive marketing strategy for your business, including your blog:
If I have overlooked any other articles on Facebook we have written, please let me know in the comments!
A List of Social Networking Sites And The Questions It Made Me Ask About Twitter
March 9th, 2010The following is a recently updated list of social networking sites derived from Experian’s Hitwise.com, main data center page: 
“Top 20 Social Networking Websites — ranked by visits (for the week ending 2/27/2010). (see right vertical column, second category)
1. Facebook — 50.15%
2. Youtube — 15.21%
3. MySpace – 15.08%
4. Tagged — 1.16%
5. Twitter — 1.14%
6. Yahoo Answers — .98%
7. Yahoo Profiles — .80%
8. myYearbook — .62%
9. Windows Live Home — .55%
10. Meebo — .45%
11. Mylife — .37%
12. Classmates — .33%
13. MocoSpace — .32%
14. Linkedin — .28%
15. Yahoo Groups — .25%
16. Club Penguin — .24%
17. BlackPlanet.com — .20%
18. Yelp — .18%
19. CaringBridge — .17%
20. MySpaceTV — .15%
Obviously we’re talking just a point in time here and these stats could increase or decrease for any entities on this list of social networking sites.
But I have to admit that I had been under the impression that Twitter and Linkedin maintained a much higher percentage of views vis-a-vis other social networking sites.
In fact, even though I was generally aware that Facebook was the most popular social networking site, I was fairly shocked to see Facebook enjoying 50 times the number of views as Twitter!
I mean, look at the front page of The Bloggers Bulletin — if you recall, we had our Twitter icon up long before our Facebook Icon! I thought of Twitter and Facebook as new, similarly-aged, “brother” tools that we, like many business people, would employ for marketing and public out-reach, in addition to our blogs.
Now it seems that I need to ask a few more questions (the first two themselves questionable) about Twitter thanks to the above list and its stats:
A Web SEO Consultant Talks “TBB”
March 1st, 2010So I am talking in-person to this wise-guy, Web SEO Consultant. I ask him how I should organize SEO for a relatively new site like The Bloggers Bulletin (“TBB”) that has 40 different Authors contributing the posts that make up its content
Web SEO Consultant: “Well, lets look at the foundation of things. The posts are effectively TBB, right? If its posts are not optimized for search, then it goes without saying that TBB itself is not optimized for search.”
I reply: “Yes, but TBB Authors are all business bloggers themselves. They write their own blogs, and their posts for their own blogs are presumably optimized for search. After all, if they weren’t, then their own blogs wouldn’t be optimized for search either! Why would they let that happen?”
Web SEO Consultant: “Do you know for sure that the personal blogs maintained by TBB Authors are in fact optimized for search? They are all busy people, perhaps they just maintain their own blogs merely as a record of their business thoughts intended for a limited audience of readers? Perhaps they only seek to have their words read by clients, business associates, friends/family? Also, perhaps their idea of SEO is a long way from a blog/site gaining real SEO traction? SEO is an abbreviation thrown around with abandon these days, after all.
Seriously, how many of the TBB Authors are paying $60 a month for a service like WordTracker.com for the purposes of SEO-ing their own blog for business?” ”And, how many who do subscribe are using WordTracker correctly?”
I reply: “Well I couldn’t really tell you, but let’s say not too many. But what about the “WordTracker SEO Blogger Plugin for Firefox or the “SEO for Firefox” extension? You know, something that’s offers a more affordable SEO package of services — affordable as in “free.” Some Authors are probably using those tools, right?”
Web SEO Consultant: “Even if they are, those free SEO tools only provide a few elements of the SEO equation for any given keyword. If Authors for TBB are using those tools and thinking their own blogs, and thereby TBB, are optimized for search, then their blogs and TBB are likely lost in the search engines unless they are a decade old with thousands of incoming links.”
I reply: “Ok, maybe so, but how about something else that isn’t free like the ScribeSEO.com service. That works great with WordPress blogs, right?”
Web SEO Consultant: “ScribeSEO certainly works to some extent with something like a blog, providing bloggers with information like keyword prominence, frequency, density within a given post, in addition to the annual search volume of the keyword. But let me ask you this: ”Is it missing anything that you need to know if you are ever hoping to rank on the first page of a search for a keyword in question?”
Let me give you a hypothetical: Lets say a keyword you are thinking of is “Twitter Tools” and its searched 27,000 times in the past fiscal year. Scribe SEO tells you that, so does the free “SEO for Firefox” extension, so does Google itself. Do you think you are going to add that keyword to your post a few times and, boom, your post page at your blog will suddenly receive 27,000 additional views per year?”
I Reply: ”Well obviously you’d want to use the keyword quite a bit in the post, in the title and so forth — that will probably help you edge the other sites out there competing for top rankings in search for that keyword.”
Web SEO Consultant: “True, using the keyword a great deal is a smart thing to do in general. But what’s the competition out there for “Twitter Tools?” Looking at WordTracker.com I see that “Twitter Tools” was searched approximately 27000 times and shows 1,760 other sites that are using “twitter tools” in their title tag and are also receiving a link from another site that has “Twitter Tools” in the anchor text of the backlink itself. The backlink is an indication of another site vouching for the destination site and the information contained therein on “Twitter Tools;” its one of the main metrics for the search engine ranking of a site.
Does TBB have any of that for “Twitter Tools?” And even if it does and your post has “Twitter Tools” in its title, do you really think that TBB is going to rank on the first page of a Google search vs. 1760 sites doing the same thing?”
I Reply: “Hmm, let me think about that…10 search results a page at Google, 1760 pages with “Twitter tools” used in title and anchor text of backlink, TBB is a young site with not a lot of external links as yet and nothing else that might help it along in the rankings. I’d say that our chances of getting a first page result using “Twitter tools” is not likely at this point in time.”
Web SEO Consultant: “Right, I mean you can use it and 5 years down the road when you’ll probably have a great many more posts associated with TBB, more incoming links for it, etc. associated with it you may rank substantially higher in search vs. the 1760 pages out there now. But even then, I’ll be very surprised if you show on the first page of a search on “Twitter tools.”
I Reply: “Yeah Good point.”
Web SEO Consultant: “Maybe you need a refresher concerning Search Engine Use Statistics and why page ranking is important. Lets look back a few years to some study info that is freely available; this is from a Forrester Research Report in 2006:
Obviously the first page of search results for a keyword is where you need to be. And the second and third pages are better than nothing. Anything else is effectively “Lost in Space.”
If SEO is important to your near term readership results, not best-case 5-10 years down the road, then don’t waste your time solely using keywords that have a ton of competitive sites also using them. You’ll put in a ton of hours trying to include them in your own site but you’ll find your site’s readership levels have not and may never improve through their use. Anybody who only does that is a…well the word begins with “S” and rhymes with “Tucker.”
I Reply: “Great, so what is TBB supposed to do?”
Web SEO Consultant: “Well, go ahead and use a few “Twitter Tools” type keywords in your posts — that is keywords that are highly searched but also very competitively used. 5 years down the road, these might be worth something for TBB if it grows. But for the near term, use your WordTracker account to find related keywords that are searched in various amounts per fiscal year, but that are not competitively used — as in that have data suggesting only 5, 10, 20, 50 other instances in which the keyword is in both a post title and within the anchor text of incoming link. With those keywords, you have a fighting chance of ranking on the first, 2nd or third page of search results on that keyword.”
I reply: “Ok, makes sense. But most of the TBB Authors probably don’t use a WordTracker account. What do I do, use my own, then make a list of related keywords that are not often competitively used by other websites and then pass that list along to TBB Authors and explain where, why, and how they’ll want to integrate them in future, if not past posts?”
Web SEO Consultant: “Exactly.”
I reply: “Ok, good advice. You still want that $1000 in 20s right?”
Alltop.com: Not Just Another RSS Feeds List
February 27th, 2010The Bloggers’ Bulletin is currently listed under both the Blogging and the Social Media Categories at Alltop.com (“Alltop”). 
If you are unfamiliar with AllTop, it is a very popular, selective RSS aggregation site (not a mere “RSS feeds list”) started by renowned writer, blogger and venture capitalist, Guy Kawasaki. Kawasaki was was one of the Apple employees originally responsible for marketing the Macintosh in 1984.
He is also noted for having brought the concept of ”evangelism,” initially focused on creating passionate user-advocates for the Apple brand, to the high-tech business.
You may ask: what is Really Simple Syndication, or “RSS?”
According to Wisegeek, “RSS or Really Simple Syndication is a useful tool for keeping updated on your favorite websites. RSS makes use of an XML code that constantly scans the content of a website for updates and then broadcasts those updates to all subscribers through a feed.”
What Alltop does with RSS feeds is group the feeds of the sites it has selected in to an “A-Z” array of categories.
Now, in my opinion, Alltop potentially offers a great deal of value for business bloggers who, for the purposes of spending more time on their own social media endeavors, seek a way to spend less time tracking down all the pertinent news of the day. And “MyAlltop” — the name for the user-customized news profile in AllTop– enables a business blogger to do just that.
All one needs to do is select up to 100 news feeds from Alltop’s A-Z listing. These feeds are then aggregated at the MyAllTop page associated with one’s username.
Of course you might argue: “Wait a minute, Alltop just sounds like NetVibes or PageFlakes — two RSS aggregators that have been around for a while. What makes AllTop any different from them?
Well, Netvibes and Pageflakes include practically every news/blog feed that has an address. In contrast, Alltop’s small review team is selective, making sure Alltop displays, “only the top news websites and blogs for any given topic.”
And the site itself states the following: ”If you’ve gotten the impression that Alltop is not based on Computer Algorithms or popular voting, you’d be right. We are highly subjective and judgemental.” So, it’s pretty safe to say that Alltop.com is not just another RSS Feeds List.
What this means for the business blogger using AllTop is that s(he) doesn’t need to waste time gauging thousands of topical feed sources of unknown quality. If it’s listed on Alltop.com, its already a news/blog feed worth reading. Check it out!
Twitter Finds a Business Serving Mid-Sized Companies?
February 20th, 2010I happened upon this piece by Clive Thompson published at Wired.com on January 25th of this year: Clive Thompson in Praise of Online Obscurity . I think business people utilizing Twitter may find it an insightful read, so I recommend it. In fact, it actually leads me to speculate about a couple of other Twitter-related maneuvers for: 
But let’s get to that by starting with a few comments from Thompson’s article:
“(on Twitter) I’ve heard this story again and again from those who’ve risen into the lower ranks of microfame. At a few hundred or a few thousand followers, they’re having fun — but any bigger and it falls apart.”
Also,
“…socializing doesn’t scale. Once a group reaches a certain size, each participant starts to feel anonymous again, and the person they’re following — who once seemed proximal, like a friend — now seems larger than life and remote.” And according to a grad student and long-standing Twitter user, Maureen Evans: “They feel they can’t possibly be the person who’s going to make the useful contribution. So the conversation stops.”
Thompson suggests the following : “There’s value in online obscurity.” And he concludes his article by suggesting tools that might reward this “obscurity” or that warned users if social circles became unsustainably large.
Certainly, I think Thomson makes interesting points in his article.
But his piece also makes me consider how small or mid-size businesses with followings in what Thompson terms, “the middle of the pack” (10s of thousands of followers), might still converse on Twitter effectively in a two-way manner.
Maybe a mid-size company with 20,000 followers might find it more effective to establish 10 Twitter accounts, add and manage those accounts at CoTweet, and encourage their existing 20,000 followers to move to one of the 10 new accounts (which will be capped at 2000 followers)? Maybe this is already done in some cases?
Or if Twitter has run out of good addresses and is finding it difficult to accomodate multiple account addresses per company, then maybe Twitter itself should enable “segmentation” of individual Twitter accounts (say through a “subdomain” type system within Twitter itself)? And since Twitter is a company, Twitter might charge businesses considerably for the ability to utlize the account segmentation function.
So I’d ask the following: might Twitter literally find dollar value in mid-sized Businesses who seek to maintain more “obscure” follower sizes across multiple Twitter subaccounts?
I suspect that Twitter and Twitter users in business have probably been considering suggestions like these for years. Who knows, maybe we’ll see the Twitter business landscape move in that direction this decade?
Google SEO and The Bloggers’ Bulletin
February 13th, 2010I’m currently in the process of updating SEO for The Bloggers Bulletin (“TBB”) to achieve better Google Search Engine Optimization our posts here. 
The ranking data I am following are derived from SEOMoz.org and its Search Engine Ranking Factors 2009 page — a page listing SEO factors and their prominence according to 72 SEO Expert Contributors.
I am especially focusing on SEO factors that a consensus of these aforementioned experts have assigned “very high importance” and ”high importance.”
In this post, I’ll discuss the first three of the “factors” mentioned in Search Engine Ranking Factors 2009 and comment on what they mean for us at The Bloggers Bulletin.
1. On Page Keyword-Specific Rankings Factors
Our root domain is what it is; it has the keyword “Blogger” — not the greatest keyword, but a keyword nevertheless. The title tag is currently under review, but you can see that the first word is certainly now a great keyword: “Blogging.”
2. On Page Non-Keyword Ranking Factors
TBB certainly has substantive content, but we do have an ongoing SEO issue with “unique” content. Many of our posts are original but a fraction are, in fact, republished from our personal blogs.
Certainly we’ve entertained ideas to combat any detrimental effect republished posts might have on our SEO. We’ve considered extensive commenting to make the republished posts appear more original to search engines. We’ve pondered advice from various online SEO sources about rewriting 25% of the content of a republished post to, again, help assure it appears at Google .
But are you really ready to guarantee that your republished posts will always have extensive comments at TBB? And even if the posts do have extensive comments, do you know how many are enough, and are you willing to take the time to prove that the comments are, in fact, enough on a case by case basis?
Furthermore, what happens when the consensus changes regarding the percentage of content to rewrite? If it’s allegedly 25% now, what happens when the consensus suggests that it is 33% or 50%? And will you take the time to prove that the rewritten posts are displaying in Google per the consensus of the day?
TBB needs content, yes. But if republished content disappears in search now or in the future, then its not pulling its weight vs. the original content at TBB.
So, for the sake of TBB’s long-term Google SEO strategy and the majority of Contributors putting up original material at TBB, all content published at TBB from now on must be original, as yet unpublished material.
3. Page-Specific Link Popularity Rankings Factors
Links. Yes, TBB is only 6 months old and I doubt we could expect thousands of high-quality links overnight unless we are throwing millions at advertising our content. But, right now we have 38 incoming links. Furthermore, the best that I can surmise is that only 8 out of 40 Contributors we have published have even linked to TBB from their own blogs/sites.
Now personally, I could care less about links. But Google obviously does and as much as I’d like to, it’s probably pointless to waste time disregarding a system that received more than 10 billion searches in January, 2010 according to Comscore.com
So, for the sake of all of us at TBB and the Google SEO of all of our work there, all Contributors must now link to TBB from their blogs or sites (preferably from sidebar)
Once we make these initial changes above, I see reason to believe that our Google SEO will start to improve.
Seeking Feedback at Gutenblog.net
January 11th, 2010(I was going to put this up as a “Private” post for Contributors, but I doubt Jason and Gutenblog.net would mind any additional feedback it might net them as a public post)
I recently received this note: 
“Hi,
I’m currently an intern for a startup that is working on creating a set of tools for power bloggers. We’re in early alpha stages, so we’re looking for help from bloggers to shape the product with their input and feedback. I wanted to speak with you regarding whether anyone at the The Blog Zone / The Blogger’s Bulletin or any of your users might be interested in providing input to develop a tool to solve their problems and inefficiencies in blogging.
A 15 minute chat should get us started. I’m available Wednesday or Thursday morning this week (1/13 and 1/14) if any time then works for you. Let me know a time and a number to reach you at and I’d be happy to call you then.
Thanks,
-Jason”
Jason Evanish
Intern, Value Media Inc
@Evanish
I replied:
Hi Jason,
He responded:
Chris,
I don’t have a toll free number, but I do have skype. My username is jason.evanish. If you prefer, I can email questions instead, but I find a conversation can be much more efficient and effective for both sides of a discussion.
You can find us at www.Gutenblog.net. Presently, we allow users to manage all of their Wordpress, Typepad, Blogger and Seeking Alpha blogs in one place by allowing for one click posting to any of the blogs while writing using the Wordpress interface. We’re in the process of developing additional features and so we’re hoping to get feedback and input from bloggers to deliver what they’re in need of most. I can send you an invite if you’d like to check out Gutenblog in its current state.
Let me know what you prefer for continuing our conversation.
Thanks,
Jason
Jason Evanish
Intern, Value Media Inc
@Evanish
If you’re interested, please follow up with Jason. I might myself. Thanks, Chris
The Direction of the Media Shift
December 11th, 2009The following includes a brief clip I shot at the recent Social Media World Forum ‘09 of speaker, Richard Jalichandra, Technorati CEO: 
Mr. Jalichandra asks the question that many bloggers probably want answered: who’s making money off their blogs? He answered that Technorati had 1.4 million registered users (Stats revised for 2009) and that 28% of those registered users claimed to either directly or indirectly make money off their blogs
Then he added:
“Everytime you hear News reports of 10 journalists losing their jobs, think about 300,000-350,000 people who are making money off their blogs — that’s where the media shift is going:“
Richard Jalichandra’s conclusion on the “media shift” represented the first time I had heard a business leader publicly draw a relationship between staff-cuts in print/online news media business and earnings in another media business — namely blogging.
Do you think he’s right?
Google Wave
November 29th, 2009Jeff Pulver, the producer of the 140 Conferences mentioned he was sending invitations to use the Google Wave service to everybody who attended the 140 Conferences. So, I signed up to use Wave a month ago after receiving Pulver’s invite. 
Well, I searched around on my Google Wave account for a while and didn’t find anybody I knew using it. So, my Wave account sat idle for a few weeks — Waves would seem to need other people to really show their stuff.
Not sure when — didn’t see a date on the message — but Google later sent me 30 invitations to use Google Wave that I could pass on to other people.
I figured the collaborative utility that Wave afforded its users might be of some use to Contributors at The Bloggers’ Bulletin. So, I sent the invitations around to as many BB Contributors as I could.
If you are looking for more information on what Google Wave is, the following links might give you a range of perspectives:
How would I describe Wave? As the product of one corporate group’s reanalysis of Email itself given the web tools, broadband connectivity, cheaper server space, real-time web interaction, social media and viral communications that have emerged on the scene for web users in the last 15-20 years. However, you might have an easier time simply describing Wave as, well, ”Wave.”
Update for New Contributors and Readers of The Bloggers’ Bulletin
November 27th, 2009
OK, so The Bloggers’ Bulletin has the following new Twitter handle: @BloggerBulletin.
I am proud to Tweet the heck out of our above, new Twitter handle (or advocate our Retweeting of it along those lines)!
Also, here’s an interview I did with Amanda Coolong at TechZulu.com at the Blog World Expo ‘09 to give you a general idea about what The Bloggers’ Bulletin is all about:
