Lorna Li | Green Marketing 2.0

presented by Giovanna & Aaron Wall

Tuesday night I went to one of the first SF Blogger Meetups to gather after a long hiatus and it was well worth the wait.

The group practically took over Amici’s pizzeria on Lombard and, with the exception of my bub.blicio.us buddy Victor Karamalis, included no one I recognized from the Web 2.0 circuit.

But it did include a treat - I got to meet, sit next to, and pick the brains of Aaron Wall and his wife Giovanna. Yes, THE Aaron Wall, of SEO Book and one of the most well known SEOs of our time. In fact, the couple is so successful with building monetizing blogs that they now occupy the ranks of the New Rich - a term coined by Tim Ferris of the 4-Hour Work Week. Both Aaron and Giovanna are seasoned veterans of blog monetization - they’ve optimized and monetized websites so that several of them bring in over six figures in income. Sharing their blogging secrets, as well as picking up the tab for 40+ attendees, was their way of giving back to the community.

They also threw in a free resource The Blogger’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization.

Alas, if only I could spend an ENTIRE DAY learning from Aaron or Giovanna!

The Blogger Meetup was largely made up of novice bloggers, and folks unfamiliar with the term SEO. Most of what the Walls shared was pretty general knowledge, seasoned with nuggets of valuable insider wisdom, some of which they urged, to keep to ourselves.

Topics covered were:

1. How to Generate and Grow Traffic

Content is King

Write good content that caters to your target audience - ideally content that is so good that it redefines the industry. Be sure to create a unique angle the reflects your personality. Mention and link out to other blogs - the owners will notice the incoming link, and often they too will share some link love.

A good tip from Aaron on scrapers stealing your unique site content is to create links to older articles in your blog post. That way, if scrapers pick up your content, at least they are providing links back to your site

Community Participation

Start online friendships by in conversations on blogs, forums and social networks related to your topic. Try to have a popular blogger mention you and link to you - this can bring considerable traffic to your site. You can also offer to write for other well-known bloggers.

Create a community project related to your topic and ask web-savvy experts to give their opinion about it. If your project is buzzworthy, all of the sudden you will have organic citations from thought leaders in the field pointing to your site from around the Web.

Pay Per Click

Use PPC to build traffic. My take on PPC is that it’s worthwhile if you have a product to sell that would at least enable you to generate some kind of ROI, otherwise buying this kind of traffic can get very expensive very quickly.

However, Aaron and Giovanna maintained that even if you’re not selling anything, buying traffic through PPC can be powerful, because, if your content is good, it can go viral. And niche keywords can actually be very cheap - around 5 or 10 cents a click, so if you have a small budget to play with, PPC traffic can be relatively inexpensive and worthwhile.

StumbleUpon Ads

For a nickel a visitor, StumbleUpon, a social search application, can drive considerable traffic to your site. StumbleUpon allows users to discover Web sites, people, videos, online communities, product information and more in a manner very much like channel-surfing, but for the Web. You can use StumbleUpon as a social media marketing tool for free - join a Stumble group for maximum impact - or as an advertiser. Other Stumblers vote your content up or down - the more positive votes you get, the more the StumbleUpon recommends your site to other Stumblers.

Paid Reviews

Solicit paid reviews from other bloggers through ReviewMe.com and PayPerPost.com.

2. Building a Large Subscription Base

RSS

Encourage RSS subscriptions by promoting RSS buttons aggressively. Create a page that explains what RSS is.

Create Brand Evangelists

Make your email accessible or use a contact form. Aggressively solicit comments and answer every real comment.

Encourage Registration

Encourage registration if you want to build a community and offer bonuses for registering.

3. Monetization Strategies

Adsense

The easiest way to monetize is Adsense, which is good for setting a baseline. Aaron recommended staying ad-free in the beginning and to avoid putting ads on your homepage unless you are very well trusted.

Affiliate Offers

Make sure that they are selective and relevant to your topic - and put the offers section on another part of your site.

Create or Sell a Product

Create or sell a product that is relevant to your topic; this works best if you are a recognized expert in your niche. You can also try to sell information-based products created from your intellectual capital, such as e-books, videos, or DVDs, or consulting services and speaking gigs.

Do not pollute your blog with advertising - it becomes a roadblock.

4. Technology

Aaron and Giovanna’s recommended blog platform of choice was WordPress, Drupal if you want to start a community. They also recommended Google Analytics or HaveAMint.com for site stats.

5. Other Takeaways

Trendspotting

One of the key takeaways from the Meetup was the value of spotting trends. According to Giovanna, “The best way to make $ out of blogging is to spot trends and be an early adopter.”

Here’s how to do it:

1. Research trends

Tools you can use to spot upcoming trends include Google Trends, trendwatching.com, ebay’s Marketplace Research Pro, which for $20/month gives you access to what people are searching for on eBay.

2. Keyword Research

Once you’ve zeroed in on a new trend, research the keywords around those trends, buy a domain name with those relevant keywords. Remember:

• Make sure the keyword is in the url
• Hyphens are branding suicide
• It doesn’t matter if your domain is a .biz, .org, or .net

3. Launch a blog about it.

Now all you have to worry about is creating a continuous stream of compelling content. Good luck!

As a blogger, creating quality content is probably the most difficult and time-consuming aspect of blogging, and not all of us have budgets to hire writers.

But according to Aaron, if you have a niche site optimized for niche keywords you can still receive a healthy stream of organic search traffic without the need to aggressively create content. The need for fresh content depends, a great deal, on the market.

Aaron, “I would never start a blog about SEO now - it’s too saturated a field.”

Giovanna, “If you are starting a blog about mortgages now - good luck!”

Given that the blogosphere only seems to be expanding exponentially, like a rogue galaxy hurtling out into space, it seems nearly impossible to gain any traction at all on anything, let alone monetize it.

Following these tips from Aaron and Giovanna Wall, you too, can earn money from your blogs. May the force be with you.

Technorati Tags: sf blogger meetup, blogging, blog monetization, blog seo, seo, search engine optimization, aaron wall, giovanna wall

These days mention “buzz marketing” and most people think of your marketing message proliferating through the Web and beyond through the word of mouth and viral mechanisms of the social web. As I mentioned in an earlier post, social media buzz marketing can generate great free hype, exponentially expand your web presence, is relatively cheap, and has great search engine optimization benefits. However, it’s important not to overlook a key process that sets the stage for a successful buzz marketing campaign - effective buzz monitoring.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have the most buzz share of all 2008 presidential candidates

Buzz Marketing can be broken down into 2 key components:

• Buzz Monitoring - the art of online reputation monitoring (and management)

• Social Media Marketing - the art of harnessing user-generated content and online conversations to enhance your brand, through blogs, forums, social networks, wikis and more.

In order to effectively directly engage the public about your brand, it’s important to know what they are already saying about your company, products, services and/or executives. By doing your buzz monitoring homework, you will not only be able to understand how much buzz share you have in your market, you will discover where your target customers hang out, what they like and don’t like about your company, and a plethora of other highly valuable insights.

Buzz Monitoring In 4 Easy Steps

There are numerous ways to monitor buzz about your company and products using free tools. Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim recommends 26 free tools you must have for your buzz monitoring needs. You may not need all of them, so keep it simple and narrow it down to the basics.

Here are 4 simple steps to help you jump start your buzz monitoring campaign:

1. Sign Up for Google Alerts

Google alerts is a service that notifies you by email of the latest Google results pertaining to your query or topic of choice. Google alerts covers your query results appearing in news, blogs, web page updates, video and groups.

Because of the large volume of alerts that will come to your inbox, it’s recommended that you create a “Rule” in Outlook that will filter all Google results to a specified folder.

Google Alerts will also list recent blog entries. However, to retrieve a listing of blog entries that span a longer period of time, use Google Blog Search or Technorati.

2. Monitor Blogs

Google Blog Search

Blog Search is Google search technology focused on blogs – all blogs, not just Blogger blogs. Google Blog Search will search for the latest blog entries related to your query. You can also subscribe to search results for your specific keywords by RSS, and receive continuous Blog Search updates for that search term.

Technorati

Technorati is an Internet search engine that focuses on blogs. I find that its search results tend to be less relevant than Google or Yahoo, delivering a broad spectrum of results for queries with more than 2 keywords and delivering nothing when exact match is enabled.

It does allow you to query tags, and suggests alternative tags related to your search term.

For continuous updates subscribe to Technorati search results via RSS feed.

Co.mments

Tracking a blog may not reveal the full conversation about your business. Even if a blog post makes a positive mention about your business, those commenting on the post can still attack your reputation. Co.mments helps you to stay on top of blog conversations by keeping you updated of new comments, allowing you to break into the fray and defend your brand at a critical moment. Just bookmark, track and follow. You can also subscribe to your tracking feed and read new comments in your feed reader or e-mail client.

3. Track Conversations in Community Forums & Message Boards

Boardtracker

Boardtracker is forum search engine, message tracking and instant alerts system designed to provide relevant information quickly and efficiently while ensuring you never miss an important forum thread no matter where or when it is posted.

You can pre-define search terms and receive an alert by email or RSS as soon as a thread matching your search term is posted in any of the thousands of forums it tracks.

If you want to track specific forums, you can also submit the forum url to be included in the Boardtracker database.

4. Use RSS Feed Readers to Stay on Top of Industry News

In the Information Age, staying on top of news the old-fashioned way can be overwhelming, time consuming, and inefficient. Why not let the latest news come to you? Sign up for a free RSS feed reader/ news aggregator and peruse hundreds of news items with your morning cup of coffee.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary. RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts. An RSS document, which is called a “feed,” “web feed,” or “channel,” can either contain a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with their favorite web sites in an automated manner that’s easier than checking them manually.

Several good, free RSS news aggregators are available, such as:

Google Reader

This is Google’s free news aggregator. You can also share news feeds by publishing your feeds to your public page.

RSS Owl

It’s a platform independent, downloadable news reader. It’s cool because it:
• Allows you to import your feeds using the OPML format
• Bookmark your favorite feeds
• Import blogrolls
• Export an entire category of news feeds into PDF, RTF, or HTML files.
• Has search options that allows you to search within news feeds or an entire feed category%

by Christophe Poizat

This article was submitted to me by Christophe Poizat, the founder of the International Network of Social Entrepreneurs, who, using the social web and guerrilla marketing tactics, has single-handedly created the word’s largest Web 2.0 network of social entrepreneurs.

We Won’t Be Doing Much Business On A Dead Planet

It is a sad but true fact: we won’t be doing much business on a dead planet. The pristine beauty of our planet is at risk of being destroyed. What has taken hundreds of millions of years to elaborate could be forever gone within a few decades because of the negative impact of the human species has on planet Earth.

Because we have been cumulatively oblivious in responding appropriately to the harsh impact our way of living has had on our environments, we now find ourselves in the middle of a crisis where our survival is at stake. Never before has the planet been in greater danger. Never before has an immediate remediation been so critically needed and so vital for our future.

All the global issues we are facing must be immediately and collectively addressed. Even if it costs a few points of economic growth, we ought to find new ways of producing goods, new ways of consuming goods, new ways of conceiving and conducting our business activities and new ways of recycling waste in larger quantities. We must act together, as one family! If we don’t act now, we will soon face the risk of extinction. It is not being pessimistic, it is simply being realistic.

Fortunately, there has been a shift of consciousness in the last few years and many people now realize something must be done to urgently address all the global issues we are facing. We know we must eliminate extreme poverty. We know we must provide education on a larger scale. We know we must use natural resources more wisely. We know we must reduce our carbon footprint. We know we must work together in our everyday lives toward building a more sustainable model. We must act on the largest possible scale and in the shortest amount of time for maximum efficiency.

Today is the day! We must act now!

The world is in dire need of a new paradigm to bring more happiness to the largest possible number of people. We need to find and make more peace within ourselves before the world will be at peace. We must stop admiring values that are vacuous and people that propound and profit from them. Enough of those false values that lead to the delusion and destruction of entire generations. We must restore a community of shared values.

We don’t need to invent anything, only rediscover and rejuvenate what assured the survival of our ancestors, what provided a true, shared joy. We must evolve spiritually. We can’t afford to stagnate at this stage of the evolutionary process much longer. Sainthood for a handful of people is not what we are after. What we are after is a global shift of consciousness. It will happen when more people awaken and unite their hearts and spirits.

It will happen when people regardless of creed, color, religion walk hand-in-hand knowing that we are one family - the human family. It will happen when more people realize that when something negative happens on the planet or to a community or in our daily life we all suffer from the consequences. It will happen when we consciously reconnect with the core of our human nature and exercise our birth rights which makes us co-creators of our destiny.

191 countries, members of the United Nations, signed the UN Millennium Resolution in 2002 which aims to eradicate extreme poverty by 2015. However, there is still an incredible amount of money spent on war around the world. Today is the time to transcend our differences and unite our energies to solve our many challenging issues.

Does it really matter to become the number one company in any given market at the expense of our common wealth and the well-being of the world?

Every day, more than 1,000 children die because they didn’t get a 15-cent measles vaccine. Almost 3 billion people around the world live on less than $2 per day. This is not acceptable. Have we really tried our very best? Governments play their myopic power games while millions of people die of malnutrition, curable diseases, lack of water and the consequences of greed, avarice and ignorance.

The solutions will not come and have not come from governments alone (if at all). The solutions will come from entrepreneurs - social entrepreneurs. A social entrepreneur is someone who recognizes a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organize, create, and manage a venture to make social change that is sustainable and for the highest good of humanity. (adapted from Wikipedia’s definition).

Social entrepreneurs have the collective power to make a real difference in today’s world and can have a decisive impact for generations to come. Social entrepreneurs have the collective responsibility to take on - one by one - all the challenges humanity faces.

When the performance of traditional entrepreneurs is measured in terms of profitability, the performance of social entrepreneurs is measured in terms of the positive impact they have on society. Social entrepreneurs measure their success in terms of the contribution made toward resolving all the global issues currently threatening the planet and humanity as a whole - one by one.

It is imperative to encourage social entrepreneurship and to inspire younger generations by instilling the spirit of social entrepreneurship worldwide. As long as we keep measuring our progress in terms of financial and geographic profitability alone, we will continue to miss our essential imperatives. We will continue to fail collectively with consequences that are seriously threatening the survival of our planet and the future of humanity.

Social Entrepreneurship can change the world and can provide a better world for generations to come. Today is the day! We are one - one family, the human family. Now is the time to join in and do good works. Not convinced? Always remember, we won’t be doing much business on a dead planet.

About Christophe Poizat

Christophe Poizat is a professional dreamer, a social entrepreneur, guerrilla marketer, mentor, business coach, speaker, author with 20+ years of international consulting experience who has lived on four continents; for more details, visit: http://christophepoizat.com

Christophe is also the founder and administrator of the International Network of Social Entrepreneurs, a global Web 2.0 community for Social Entrepreneurs to connect, share, collaborate and promote social entrepreneurship worldwide. For more details, visit: http://inse.collectivex.com

Technorati Tags: christophe poizat, international network for social entrepreneurs, inse, social entrepreneurship, social enterprise, sustainability, web 2.0