The next best thing to a guest blog post

Adding new eyes to your blog
shouldn't be this complicated

All of us who spend our time in the depths of social media have been told ad infinitum that writing guest posts is the missing magic that will catapult us to stardom and wealth beyond the realms of Taylor Swift. Taylor secretly wants to write a guest post on my site, but I won't let her. Anyway, there is another way to add significant traffic to your blog that is rarely discussed. Whether you are writing an article that will serve as a guest post or one that is going to be posted directly to your blog, you can use expert quotes in your article to help significantly drive new eyes to your blog.

How does using expert quotes work? 
The idea is so simple, yet so overlooked. When you are crafting your blog article, include a quote from a known expert in the subject area of your article. Once you incorporate expert commentary into your blog article, you'll find that the expert who is being quoted will promote your post in social media to their own networks.

Everyone, including experts, wants to elevate their level of respect (being further viewed as an expert) in their niche. Once your article is published, they will reach out to their Twitter minions, Facebook likers,
their email list, and link to you on their personal  blog. And, if they are separately employed and have enough clout within their own organization, they will convince their employer's social media team to promote it as well.

How do you get an expert to provide a quote?
This is easier than you may think. But you've got to consider your target first, and then do a little work to make the process as seamless as possible.

• Look for an expert who is reachable
• It's easier to reach out to an expert who works for a small software company than it is if you try to reach Seth Godin. Not that he's impossible to reach. In fact, he calls me so frequently to ask my advice I've had to put his mobile number on auto-block so I can get back to my real life. Seth, if you're reading this, sorry, you're going to have to come up with your own brilliant ideas from now on. 
• Reach out to the expert and tell them you are writing an article and would like to include an expert quote from them.
• "Own it"- own it means even if your blog only has two regular readers, one of them being your mom, when you contact the expert you need to be confident and sound more like a journalist than some schlep with no blog readers.

Make it easy for them to provide the quote

• Instead of asking the expert to write a quote, write the quote for them and ask them to review and approve. 
• Send them your full article with their quote already included
• The fact that you have pre-written the quote makes it so much easier to get the quote approved. And since you have sent them the full article, they can understand the context of how their quote will be used. What you are trying to avoid is waiting around for them to write a quote and send it back to you.
• Include links back to their site or blog. That is their payback for providing the quote.

Who are the best experts to target?

• The best experts to target are authors, press contacts, and those who simply participate in answering questions on LinkedIn or Quora (more on that below). 

In order to get an expert quote, what should your article be about?

• Do a review of an ebook (or pull a quote from an ebook). Reach out to the author directly.
• Review a software product (or similar). Reach out to the company's marketing team. Or, look at their press releases area of their website and find the appropriate press contact. Typically, press contacts at companies are very reachable.
  
  Example: "Post to multiple social networks quickly using one simple tool "

Where to find an expert:

• Finding an expert can be as easy as posting a question on a LinkedIn Group and waiting to see who answers. Once a good answer is given, take a look at that person's LinkedIn profile to see their level of expertise. Do they work at a respected company in your niche? Do they author an important blog in your niche?  
• This would also work on Quora or LinkedIn Answers.
• The type of experts that answer questions on these sites are the type of people who are likely to be reachable, and will respond to you.
  
  Examples:
  From a question about why ISPs block images, an expert ended up providing a quote for "Why email marketers should avoid the coming wave of mosaics in email and what to do instead"
  From a question about email deliverability, an expert ended up providing a quote for "Flush your email marketing job down the toilet with this one big mistake" 

Why bother adding an expert quote?

• This elevates the respect level that readers will associate to the article, and thus to you. 
• The expert will promote the article to their social networks, driving new eyeballs to your blog. The effect is similar to having your article posted as a guest blog which will include backlinks to your site which drives great SEO to your site.

If you are interested in a quote from a not-so-humble email marketing expert, let me know.

Image credit flickr under Creative Commons

Post to multiple social networks quickly using one simple tool

Are you overwhelmed with the notion of all these social networks that you are supposed to share your blog articles on? Your boss says "our new corporate mission statement indicates we need to post to multiple social networks in order to stay competitive in the current business landscape". Whatever. It can be daunting. Especially if you are just getting started which means you don't really know which social networks are going to be the important ones for you to post. Some experts advise that you just focus on the top couple of really big social networks such as Facebook business pages, Twitter, and LinkedIn. However, if you are not willing to take that schtick for an answer, and you want to post your blog articles on multiple social networks, there is a free application that can help you manage all of this, Shareaholic.
Tweet

Shareaholic is a plugin that is available for several different browsers. Once you publish your article on your blog, you'll be able to click on the Shareaholic icon in your browser and individually post a link to the article on all the different social networks you choose. This is a one-at-a-time exercise, but Shareholic will still speed things up for you. See the screenshot below that shows the Sharaholic icon and a list of social properties displayed within a browser window.

• Go to shareaholic.com and download the proper browser plugin
• You can configure which social channels you want to use at  shareaholic.com/account/services (image below)
• Visit the url of the blog article that you want to share
• Click the Sharaholic icon on your browser
• In the dropdown, click the first social network (for example, Facebook)
• A separate popup window will open. It might ask you to allow Shareaholic to access your social account.
• Fill in the fields on the popup window and submit
• Your update will be posted to your social network
• Click the Shareaholic icon again and move on to the next social network in your list

Quirks, general mayhem, and the good stuff

Facebook
Note that a few of the social networks behave in a quirky manner, particularly if you are trying to post to your business account, instead of to your personal account. For example, with Facebook, it makes you first connect Shareaholic to Facebook using your personal account, but you can then post to your Facebook business page IF you use the little selector thingey shown below. After you click "Post to Profile", you'll be able to select a Facebook business page to post to.

To post to a Facebook business page, click "Post to Profile"

LinkedIn
With LinkedIn, don't just post to your updates, instead, also post to your LinkedIn Groups as well. Shareaholic makes this easy by clicking the "Post to Groups" box, and then typing in the names of your groups.

For LinkedIn, click "Post to Groups"

Short Links made easy
When I'm using Shareaholic to post our blog articles to multiple social networks, I prefer to be able to track all the links that people click on across all of those networks. The way I do that is by always using bitly as the creator for all my short-links. Shareaholic makes that easy too. Once you click the Shareaholic icon, the dropdown will display your bitly shortlink. In the screenshot below, see the bitly url at the bottom of the list of social channels? I click the Copy icon and I now have the bitly short link that I am after. I use that as the url for every social network post I make.

Social sharing chicklet links onto your blog
One extra-happy-bonus feature of Shareaholic is that you can get a set of those social share chicklet button thingamajiggers to go on your blog posts. They look like the below. Shareaholic even has an integration to Blogger, Wordpress, and Tumblr blogs so you can easily add them to those platforms. Or you can add them to your regular website. Choose from three designs and different sizes. Once installed, they simply "work." You don't have to do anything else to them. You'll see them at the bottom of all our blog articles.

Highlight more of your site's content with Shareaholic Recommendations!
Shareaholic's head of marketing, Janet Aronica, points out that "adding Shareaholic Recommendations to your blog increases pageviews and time on site by recommending your site's own content at the bottom of each article you publish." Shareaholic's recommendation engine will create a display of a few images (plus text) that encourage readers to click through and read other articles around your site. Shareaholic will crawl your site and find all the pages, and recommend which ones the visitor should read next. This requires a bit of fancy-pants html work on your part, unless you use a Wordpress blog, which means you can use the Shareaholic Wordpress plugin. You Wordpress people are so special. We bow to your mightiness. Post these recommendations at the bottom of each blog article.

Shareaholic Recommendations - set these to appear at the bottom of your blog articles

Kerphlooey
Sometimes the Shareaholic service is just down! (or it's that something goes wrong with your browser). "Down", taken from the ancient Greek, meaning it's kerplunkt, kerphlooey, dead, "not working in an optimal manner", and the like. So, you might click on the Shareaholic icon in your browser and nothing happens. Or, you click on it, select the social network, and no pop up happens. Nice. But, it's not like you're paying for the service so no sense crying over spilled social beans. Spilled coffee beans, yes. Spilled social beans, no. Although, Loraine in the cube next to me accidentally inhaled a coffee bean once.....


Although Shareaholic isn't perfect, and doesn't offer any auto-scheduling or other fancy hoo-ha, it's still an effective time saver when posting to multiple social networks.

Read next: Your email open rate may not mean what you think

Be glad Twitter broke up with LinkedIn

You date a girl for all that time, you give her all that great stuff, take her on dates to see those sappy girl movies, and then she dumps you for Steve McStud-o-bicepts because he has the really cool hair that has the swooshie thing at the front.  Well that's the situation with Twitter giving the old heave-ho to LinkedIn this week.  What does this mean to you as a small business owner?  In the past, if you created a Twitter post thingey (called a tweet), you could add "#li" in your tweet and that little code gizmo told Twitter to also post your tweet as an update to your LinkedIn profile.  This was looked at as a time saving measure whereby you could update both Twitter and LinkedIn at the same time (oh, and by the way, on your LinkedIn profile, there's also a place to post updates, for those of you that don't know).

Twitter has decided to bite the hand that feeds it by canceling this ability.  Not a smart move in my opinion, but it's no dumber than those nimnods at Netflix who decided it would be a good idea to separate their DVD vs streaming services.

Anyway, I'm really not that upset with this Twitter/LinkedIn spat.  Why?  Because you shouldn't be using the same text to post on Twitter as you post on LinkedIn (or any other social network) in the first place.  The reason I say that is because the viewers of  your different social networks have different expectations of what they want to see from you on each social platform (click the link and look for "The Social Breakup").  Twitter followers expect one type of post, Facebook fans expect another, and LinkedIn users a third.  The short of this is that you need to customize each post you place on each different social platform.  So, loosing this functionality isn't really much of a loss.

If you want to help streamline your control over posting to each different social network, try installing the Shareaholic plugin  in the Google Chrome browser.  It will at least help make the process somewhat easier and faster.

The Eyes Have It

LinkedIn to help establish your personal brand

If there’s one social networking site that’s essential for professionals, it’s LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the world’s largest and most popular professional network, where people get to interact, connect, engage, obtain new information, find leads, hire and be hired, and more. If you’re a job seeker or a professional who isn’t on LinkedIn, then you really should consider signing up for an account now!

Having a LinkedIn profile can definitely help you land more jobs and get more clients and customers. It’s practically like having an online resume that the whole world can view – it definitely helps spread the word about your personal brand. Google even likes LinkedIn, and tends to rank it high in its search engine. With clients and hiring managers Googling you today before they hire you,  having a professional LinkedIn profile coming up in search can definitely be an advantage.

Once you’ve signed up on LinkedIn, it’s essential that you complete your profile. And one of the things you need to do in order to complete your profile is to upload a photo.

There continues to be a lot of debate whether to upload a photo or not on LinkedIn, but for many people involved in the hiring business, a professional looking photo is a must, if you want to be hired.

TheLadders recently conducted a study where they examined the eye movements of 30 professional recruiters over a 10-week period. They used an eye tracking heat map that showed the length of time that a recruiter focused on a part of your LinkedIn profile. In the study, it was discovered that recruiters spent 19% of their time looking at your profile. After devoting significant time to the profile, they then checked your current job position and your education, but very little time was spent on reading your specialties, skills, and past work experiences.

So what does this mean for you as a personal brand? Since recruiters focus a lot on your picture, it’s essential that you put up a professional looking photo on your LinkedIn profile, something that really helps you brand yourself and convince people to hire you or obtain your services.

Most people are visual creatures. When they look at a page, most people’s eyes tend to focus on the picture first before they move on to the text. Knowing this, it’s important that your LinkedIn photo shows you off to your best advantage.

You may think that putting a logo on your profile can help you with your personal branding campaign. Even though this might not be bad, most people would still prefer to interact with a real person rather than just a logo.

Having a blank profile photo is even worse than a less than best-quality photo. You may think that leaving the photo spot blank will help you to not get discriminated based on your looks, but most people really want to see what you look like before they even consider hiring you. If you have a blank profile, they may just skip looking it over and move on to the next one. They may also wonder what you’re trying to hide… Your profile may even appear suspicious to some/ After all, why is it hiding behind a blank image?

If you think about it, images are powerful when it comes to personal brand recognition. Consistently using the same image for different profiles really helps you brand and position yourself as an expert in your field.

Did you know that there are fake profiles in LinkedIn? Since it’s so easy to just sign up and create an account anyone could make an account in your name, and who would know better if it’s really you or not? This is why having a photo up can help show people that you are real. This gives your social media credibility. It really helps when it comes to the social marketing of your personal brand.

To summarize, remember that when it comes to your personal branding campaign, LinkedIn is one powerful tool. It helps show you to your best advantage, and it has Google juice so it ranks high in the search engines.

Make sure that you put up a professional looking photo that represents you well. People are highly visual – the recent study showed that people really tend to focus longer on a photo than the text that accompanies it. And having a photo really helps people recognize and remember your brand more.

Because it is so important that people recognize your personal brand on LinkedIn, take the steps that are required to keep others from thinking of you as just a random professional looking for work. Use your LinkedIn photo to show off the best you possible.

5 easy steps to build your small business using LinkedIn

Pizza box math humor

Search engines love LinkedIn, just not necessarily YOUR page - 5 steps to build your small business using LinkedIn

If you run a pizza joint that gets most of it's business from passers-by on the corner of 8th & University Place in Greenwich Village, NY (no, there's not really one there, I already checked so stop looking), then your business might not need LinkedIn. But the rest of us, that are made or broken by the connections we make with business people, do need it. Many business people have a presence on LinkedIn but they aren't really maximizing it.  There are several hidden things that will make your time spent on this great social network well worth your time.

1- Link to your website using keywords, not the pesky "Company Website" text that LinkedIn wants to force on you

See the difference in the 2 links?  One has keywords, one does not

To help boost your search engine attractiveness / searchability / affinity / magnetic-ness and all around awesome-oscity, you need to use keywords for the text of the link that points back to your website. How do you do that? See below. This is a simple way to get LinkedIn to let you use whatever text you want for your website link instead of the old stand-by of "Company website" that they default for you. Just select "Other" on the field type dropdown.

Choose "Other" from the Website dropdown to expose a text field

2- Search engines love LinkedIn, but not your page because you don't use keywords in the right places

To get found, you need to make sure that you've not only got the right keywords on your LinkedIn profile, but you've got them in the right places.  Search engines love to see keywords in important places.  Heading tags on a webpage that have keywords in them are given more weight by the search engine than those same keywords in the body of the text of the page.

Add keywords in your job title

Yeah, yeah, I know, you have an official job title and you're afraid your boss will see that you've unofficially granted yourself another one. But really, I don't think she'll care. In the job title field, go ahead and title yourself with something slightly more keyword-awesome than "Sr. Director, Finance at Initech."  How about "Sr. Director, Offshore Financing and Finance Development Consultant Lead at Initech."  With a title like that, you're far more likely to get found by Google searches or LinkedIn searches.

Add keywords to your heading field.  

Same drill. Use some different keywords here. Just keep in mind that you don't have to regurgitate your job title onto the heading field.  

3- You have a personal profile page, but you need a business page

I don't mean to say "duh" here, but.... duh. Actually, if you're new to LinkedIn it's nothing to be ashamed of.  But, go through the process of creating a business page for your company.

4- Showcase your company with video

If your company has a short video, add it to your LinkedIn company business page. How? Well one way is to use the SlideShare app on LinkedIn. 

• Create your video
• Embed your video into a Powerpoint slide
• Using the SlideShare app on LinkedIn, upload your ppt to your profile page.  
• If you don't want the video to start playing immediately, then have the first slide of your ppt be just a intro slide with text that instructs viewers to click Play.  

In PowerPoint, here's where to embed a video into a .ppt file

5- Post, and post again. Use LinkedIn like a social network like Facebook

In the same manner you'll post updates to your Facebook page, post updates to both your LinkedIn company page and personal page. Just don't spam. Your friends and business followers don't want to hear about Farmville. A lot of companies just create a business page and then leave it alone. No! It's for you to tell the world what you are up to, why you do what you do, and finally explain why your haircut looks like Rod Blagojevich.

And, when posting to LinkedIn, keep in mind that people don't want to see the exact same post you just put on Twitter with all the little Twitter hashtags and @ symbols and hoo-ha. Instead, write in a short, business-like tone, use images, and point to your article/blog. The text of your post would look something like a type-written version of what your mother used to say to you when you were little and got in trouble. You know, short, to the point, and with just a touch of color. 

Have any other great LinkedIn ideas?  Post them in the comments below.

Read next: Be glad Twitter broke up with LinkedIn

Image credit: Flickr under Creative Commons

Latest Updates on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a great place to meet professionals in any industry. It allows us to connect and interact with people who share our interests. We can also connect with people who can be potential business partners. Like any other website or business, there is that constant need to add features and make changes to ensure that we always give what our customers want and need.

Last February, LinkedIn announced a new feature that will help any business or professional gain a wider network. They added the “Follow Company” button. All you have to do is embed the button on your website, blog, or social media site. People who choose to follow your brand will receive your updates in their LinkedIn feeds. With this feature, you can also follow companies or personal brands whom you are interested in. You’ll be able to read the latest updates from them and get insightful ideas that can help your brand or small business.

This latest feature is somewhat similar to what other social media sites have come up with. How then can you use this to promote your brand and small business when you are already doing the same with your other social media sites?

Here are some advantages of using the “Follow Company” button on your personal brand or small business site:

Connect with more experts – LinkedIn reports they have 135 million registered users from different parts of the world. With this number, you can connect and gain insights from experts on your industry or even other industries. Reach out to those who inspire your brand and connect with them. Reach out to those who your brand inspires and take inspiration from them as well.  This will help your business grow and spread the word about your personal brand.

Reach out to more customers – When you embed the “Follow Company” button on your social media sites and blogs, it will help you widen your audience reach. It’s a way of connecting with customers who are more comfortable using LinkedIn compared to any other social media platform. You can then ensure that all your followers from your different social networking sites are given the same updates about your personal brand or business. It also guarantees that no one gets left out.

This new LinkedIn feature can really work to your advantage in terms of promoting your brand. However, before you add it to your other sites, you should make sure that your LinkedIn profile is good to go. You have to make sure that you are ready to gain more followers and be prepared to connect with them once your list starts to grow. Here are some preparation tips:

1. Update your profile

If you haven’t done this in a long time, do it. Make your profile look presentable and professional. Write the things that best describe your personal brand or your small business. Talk about your brand culture and tell your story. A good place to focus is your brand values and goals. This will give your audience an idea of who you are and how you can help them.

2. Don’t rush

Sure, this is a new feature and you can benefit from it, but take your time in preparing your profile. Just like your other sites, you have to have a strategy in order to gain the benefits of increasing your audience and connecting with people. Once you have it down, you can add the button to your site. Sooner or later people will start connecting with you on LinkedIn.

3. LinkedIn app on your Smartphone

If you are using an iPhone or Android, you can download the app on your phone. This way you can connect with your audience even when you are on the move. It’s handy because when you’re stuck somewhere, instead of playing games on your phone, you can update your status or answer to followers who are connecting with you. It’s a great way to make your online presence felt.

LinkedIn is one of the most underutilized platforms of the social networks.  Yet, it’s strength and viability are not to be underestimated.  Share your linked In link or company page on our Facebook page – http://facebook.com/mariaelenaduron We would really like to see how you are using the oldest social network!

Why Social Media Can Help Women Entrepreneurs

Being an entrepreneur is hard enough.  You have your entire business riding on your back, and regardless if you have built up an empire, a small business or have a one woman show you need to know how to do many things.

Social media, or new media – whatever you want to call it – doesn’t seem to be losing too much steam.  Many businesses have figured out how to use this medium to their benefit and help gain more leads, brand awareness and even use it as a networking tool.

However you decide to use social media, you should be aware that women are leading the game.  A study conducted by BlogHer and iVillage states that, “nearly three-quarters (73%) of online women are now active social media users, engaging weekly or more often with popular social media platforms.”

Having a great networking circle is a must for entrepreneurs. Knowing where to go to find like-minded women can keep you up to date on your industry as well as having a great circle of entrepreneurs to run ideas off of.

WomenForbes.com reports that “women often use online social networking tools to make connections.”  Jodi Kahn, the head of iVillage, goes on to say in the article that, “We're women--we like to talk about things. Women use social media as a way to connect."

For women, the networking sites most used are: Twitter, MySpace, Bebo, Facebook and Flickr.  This doesn’t mean you need to stick solely to these sites, but it just means you will run into more women engaging on these sites.

Although social media is a great tool, remember you need to offset social media with a great website.  After all, where are you going to send your Twitter followers if you don’t have a website?  If you want to keep the conversation going, have a blog on your site as well.

Having a blog can give your site more traffic, allows you to set yourself as an expert in your field and also allows your visitors to communicate through comments.  Being able to stay connected to your clients in more than just one medium is key.

What types of social media tactics do you find helpful?

Shannon Suetos is a writer based in San Diego, California.  She writes extensively for an online resource that provides expert advice on purchasing and outsourcing decisions for small business owners and entrepreneurs such as phone systems & VoIP service at Resource Nation.