These are just communications tools. We use them. We use them to make media. We use them to weave marketing, sometimes. We use them to tell stories about your organizations or our wants or whatever it is we’re talking about. Spending hours updating status, spending hours chatting, doing things that take us away from our objectives can sometimes feel easy.

Some ways to stay vigilant:

• Use an egg timer. If you’re going to venture out onto Twitter, time it.
• Keep a sticky note of your objectives in sight of your monitor.
• Ask yourself for every blog post what your goal with that post should be.
• Ensure that you’re doing this all with some goal in mind, and can you measure that goal?
• Tend to your main objectives first, and use the secondary time for social media.

Your mileage will vary. You’ll see results in some of what you do. But if you’re doing it because it’s what you think you’re supposed to do, keep your eye on things. Stay vigilant.

Yesterday, my blog was not my job, so I didn’t write one. Today? I have two speeches over the next few days. That was my job first, and then this post.

We do want to keep our social presence up, and we can’t let our blogging fall too far behind, but to remember your job from time to time is to remind yourself what will yield the most value in your day.

Your Blog is Not Your Job is a post from Sitemaster

By Yoast founder Joost de Valk

Two weeks back, while speaking at SAScon, I said in a panel there that “Facebook is the scariest shit I’ve seen in years”, related to their latest updates. I also said it was a lawsuit waiting to happen, coming from the European Union. I was right. Well, not entirely, it’s not a lawsuit yet. I referred to a blog post on State of Search by my buddy Bas about Privacy, Facebook & Google. He made a very good analogy to real life:

Imagine this: you are buying a bread in the supermarket which has discount passes. That means they know what you bought. You payed with your bank card, so the bank now knows where you spent your money. Meanwhile you get gas outside of the supermarket so the bank now knows you came with the car, bought the bread and had gas. The gas station also knows which kind of gas and the fact that you decided to buy that candy-bar which was staring at you next to the counter. All bits of information which are separately not that important. But now here’s one company which allows you to say whether or not you liked the services. In return, they store every bit of information, so the bread, the candybar, the gas, all of it. And then they sell, or give away, that data to a third party, lets say a gym.

I guess now you get why it scares me? Luckily, the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party (*cough* nice name *cough*) said in their letter:

Social networks needed to have a default setting in which access to profile information and information about users’ connections were “limited to self-selected contacts”.

There’s no word not to be misunderstood there, and I fully agree. Especially in the light of recent developments, allowing people to search for updates from outside Facebook. Weird thing is, I actually only started to use Facebook a bit better a couple of weeks back, on the day of the F8 developer conference where they announced these changes. I see the possibilities for marketing on & with Facebook a bit better now, and understand the power it has for advertisers. Those advertisers get that as well, it turns out, comScore says Facebook served up 176.3 billion ads to U.S. customers in Q1, being 16.2% of the market.

So I hope they get this fixed. I don’t want to do away with Facebook, not just yet, I do want them to change their way of thinking about and dealing with privacy though, and not just now, but for all eternity.

[Yoast]

[ad] Empty ad slot (#3)!

Facebook and the Lack of Privacy is a post from Sitemaster

It’s no secret that people love Facebook. Some are practically addicted to the thing. So how do you convince a stubborn audience to focus on your content instead of Farmville?

If you guessed, “Maintain a Facebook fan page”, you’re wrong. Here’s why. You may have noticed that the fans on your fan page are either friends and family, random people who don’t interact, or those crazy, obsessed fans that already follow you on every social media source available.

Why is this the Case?

Facebook is its own world. Those who choose to leave Facebook and venture out onto the Internet, to either educate or entertain themselves, don’t want to mix the two worlds. The last thing your readers want is their friends finding out they’re fans of “Personality Development Blog” or “Daily Menopause Tips.”

Before I dissect this issue, there are four questions you need to answer before making a plan to market to this new audience:

• Does this audience know they need my help?
• Does this audience want help?
• What are the biggest problems this audience encounters that I can help them with?
• Has this audience evolved with the economy and/or technology?

Once you have a good idea of what this new audience wants, all you have to do is tailor your marketing platform to their interests without letting them know you’re actually marketing to them. I’ll explain how near the end.

College Students: The Classic Example

About a year ago I decided to start a blog for college students. Being a senior in college, I thought this would be easy. I decided to go after a niche market of students interested in using new technology to aid them in their studies – but there was a problem.

The college students of today have grown up on Facebook since its inception just over 6 years ago, and to many, it’s their home online. It’s how they keep up with all the facets of their social life, which we all know besides going to class, studying and taking exams, takes top priority.

You’d be surprised how many students keep Facebook as their browser homepage; so naturally, my target audience was stuck on the world’s largest social networking site leaving me with an arduous task.

Do Your Research

Since college students spend the majority of their free time on Facebook, you have to work extra hard to market to them. When they do venture off Facebook they don’t go very far. They tend to go to sites such as YouTube or CollegeHumor, but they don’t particularly use Google to search for things they need.

Instead, this generation is much more likely to search for things they want. For example, students are much more interested in college parties than “college help,” “college websites” or “college blogs.”

Knowing Your Audience

The college student example can be applied to any audience that:

1. Grew up with technology.
2. Is desensitized to advertising.
3. Shows more focus on wants than needs.

If you don’t know your target audience well, their bandwidth for dealing with marketing is extremely narrow. Once they feel they are being marketed to, they unequivocally tend to shut down. So how do you market to this difficult segment?

Relevancy. In order to reach this audience, you have to be as targeted as possible with your message. Since your audience is busy commenting on photos, looking for new games and just busy having fun, it will take time and effort in order to get noticed.

Tips and Strategies

1. Understand how your site is better and different than other sites. Can you think of specific problems that you solve well and better than others? Finding a niche may help gain some initial traffic. I’m sure you recognize that word travels fast once you generate some initial success.
2. Turn your audiences wants into needs. When I started CampusByte, I knew my audience was largely made up of iPhone users. I wrote several articles targeting students with iPhones. It was only a matter of time until Google picked one up. I now rank on the first page for “Must Have iPhone Apps.” Your audience will take the bait and stick around for the other content because you were able to satisfy their initial search.
3. Encourage interaction. Facebook allows users to fully interact with their friends by commenting, “liking”, sharing and subscribing. If your site allows for similar actions, your new reader is much more likely to stick around. Encourage new readers to sign up for updates and make it clear that you want them commenting on your blog.
4. Don’t let online tools be the only means of gaining customers. Get published – magazine, newspaper, newsletter, whatever. Let people know who you are and more importantly, listen to them! Put up posters. Sponsor an event. Beg. You should be working now to be part of your new readers lives – all of these are great opportunities to reach out.

(Sitesketch 101)

Moving People From Facebook To Your Blog is a post from Sitemaster

I’ll never recommend paid online advertising as a long-term solution for various reasons.
Search engine users prefer naturally appearing links

Most search engine users don’t pay much attention to pay-per-click ads that appear along with the natural search results because they think the links that pay to appear don’t have the relevant information on them (and that’s why they needed to pay). In most of the cases banners that appear on content-rich websites too don’t generate many clicks because people are more interested in consuming the actual content on the web page.

An aware user knows that only those links get higher, natural rankings that the search engine algorithms prefer and since they trust the search engine they use, they normally show more interest that appear with higher rankings rather than links that appear in the PPC sections.
The cost of paid online marketing is recurring and never stops

Since you are paying for every click and every ad impression, you are always paying, and this cost keeps mounting with increasing competition for the same spot or the same keyword.

Traffic coming from SEO on the other hand is practically free after your website has been search engine optimised. After that you just need to maintain your position and it doesn’t cost you much. Look at it like this: if your link appears on the first page of a search engine, whether it generates one click or a million clicks, the only money you spend on — if you do at all — is the SEO effort.

SEO keeps your website in shape

SEO done in the right manner makes sure your website has clean markup, has relevant content, has a well-defined navigation system, loads fast, and is totally accessible. And this is very good for your online business.

With paid online marketing you can generate traffic even with a lousy website, and this in turn costs you lots of money without generating much business.

So considering the above points, I recommend paid online marketing as a short-term strategy, but not a long-term strategy, especially if your marketing budget matters to you.

[via phoenix realm]

Natural SEO Is Always Better Than Paid Online Marketing is a post from Sitemaster