techipedia | tamar weinberg

Today is my birthday, and I decided to give you all a gift that few of you have been highly anticipating for a few months now. My most popular post on this site — probably by far — was last year’s Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2007 compilation. I spent about 3 days (and nights) on it (without sleep) and I was quite happy with the turnout. This year, I began starting to write this compilation in the first week of December. The collection begins with posts that start in January of 2008 and have been collected and shared in the last 12 months. Like last year, I’ve grouped them into different categories and written short descriptions on each post. There’s no order to the posts; I’ve used my bookmarks and a variety of social sites and peer recommendations to create this list. I hope this year’s list surpasses last year’s. Let me know how I did in the comments.

Here’s how this works: In the Internet Marketing Best Posts “series,” I take posts that are typically timeless — they’re not confined to a specific event or news occurrence — they’re valuable for the long haul in terms of Internet Marketing and creative strategy. Hopefully, you’ll see that these posts are still relevant in a few years down the road.

This is a sponsored post by Sears but the thoughts within are mine and mine alone.

As a blogger, you have the potential to reach a tremendous audience. As an individual, perhaps a company or an entrepreneur who is looking to spread the word about a new product launch, you have the potential to keep marketing costs down by reaching out to bloggers and having them talk about your product. One of the best ways to achieve this goal is through blogger outreach, which typically includes more than just sending out your press release: give the blogger the opportunity to try your product. Send them your book. Or your beanbag chair. Or give them full download rights to your new software product without restrictions.

You can do something else entirely. As part of the Don’t Just Give a Gift, Grant a Wish campaign by the Sears department store, I had the opportunity to participate in a shopping spree to help me or someone else realize our dreams. The idea behind this initiative was that I was given a $500 Sears gift card to “Grant a Wish” for myself, a loved one, or charity. At the same time, I was to photograph my experience in the store.

Social media mimics real relationships — in many cases. Would you do the following within real face-to-face relationships?

• Jump on the friendship bandwagon without properly introducing yourself?
• Consistently talk about yourself and promote only yourself without regard for those around you?
• Randomly approach a friend you barely talk to and simply ask for favors — repeatedly?
• Introduce yourself to another person as “Pink House Gardening?”

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you may need a refresher course on social media etiquette — and perhaps real-life etiquette also. Here are some egregious sins that you must not perform on social media sites.  Avoid these violations and learn how to manage and maintain online relationships on a variety of popular social media sites.

Facebook

• Adding users as friends without proper introductions. If you’re looking to make friends, tell people who you are. Don’t assume they know you — especially if they, well, don’t.
• Abuse application invites and consistently invite friends to participate in vampire games. Many call this spam.
• Abusing group invites. If your friends are interested, they’ll likely join without your “encouragement.” And if they don’t accept, don’t send the group request more than once by asking them to join via email, wall post, or Facebook message.

This is a guest post by search engine optimization expert Gab Goldenberg, who actually spends a good chunk of his time in a classroom: he’s a law student!

I’m taking two seminar courses at school this term, and they each resemble a particular form of social media. A seminar is different from a regular course in that it necessarily involves interaction with the students — a seminar is to a regular lecture course as web 2.0 is to web 1.0. What is interesting about these two seminars I’m taking is the difference in the teaching styles and the relationships that result.

Professor Daniel Jutras’ classes begin with him and/or students covering some current events relating to the seminar’s topic. Then, Professor Jutras lectures for about an hour, covering the principal ideas in the week’s readings. We pause for 10 minutes, and when we return, the class asks questions or makes comments, to which Professor Jutras responds.

I see this seminar as a blog. The blogger (Professor Jutras) posts his ideas, occasionally throws in some editorial and takes some light, widget-fed microblogging (the current events some students share). As an aside, Professor Jutras makes it obvious when he’s editorializing, which makes it easy to take it for what it’s worth: an informed opinion, but not necessarily fact.

While I prepare to relocate (I’m moving next week!), I was fortunate to have the help of James Duthie, a serial guest blogger from Online Marketing Banter, a blog on social media, marketing, and more.  You can subscribe to more of his ramblings here.

A few weeks ago I wrote a post over at SEO Scoop comparing the quality of search engine traffic against social media traffic. The aim of my little experiment was to test the assumption that search traffic was of a higher quality than social media traffic. And as most would have guessed, the mighty engines prevailed as the superior source of traffic. Many people found the research interesting, but a number of people commented that the social networks probably shouldn’t be grouped together. Some are built for the masses whereas others have tightly defined niche audiences. So the question arose - was social media traffic misrepresented by grouping traffic from all networks together? Is traffic from highly targeted niche networks better than traffic from generic networks? (Hat tip to Gab for posing that question to me.) Let’s find out.