Now for the Social Media All-You-Can-Eat-Buffet

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website marketing Now for the Social Media All You Can Eat Buffet

Here’s all the many areas you can use to promote. I’m going to cover them briefly here. Each will  probably have their own ebook available on the companion CD. There are singular details to each which are boring in the extreme unless you intend to apply them in your marketing mix.

a. Articles

These are short pieces of content which are submitted to Article Directories and contain a short biographical section with links back to your site.  There are specific nuts and bolts about how to do this and I’m going to repeat part of what I said in “How to Roll Your Own Blog”:

I’m going off on a bit of a tangent right now and tell you one more venue of where to publish your stuff. Pay attention here, since this is going to be a bit technical – but it’s also old-school and still brings a lot of traffic to  your blog and helps you get your message out.

Early on, there was a popular way of providing content by getting people to write short pieces of information and then hosting them. These places are known as article directories. And there are thousands upon thousands of them. People even started creating an income through just writing articles and getting people to buy their stuff from their little web sites. There is quite a bit of history to them – too much to go into here. But you can start submitting to these with what you already know and the content you’ve already published.

Article directories are also another way to create incoming links to your blog. And the best ones can be voted up or down – so this is a logical extension of what we’ve already been talking about.

Now, not all article directories are the same value  – and I’m going to give you the short list, but first we have to go over some points.

Duplicate Content Penalties
Search engines like Google quickly found out that people were trying to game their early algorithms by instantly posting massive sites. One of their solutions was to evaluate based on duplicative content and move those results over to an “additional results” section – meaning they won’t show up unless you specifically ask for them.

If you simply posted to an article directory exactly what you wrote for your blog, it probably won’t show up in Google – with few exceptions. And if you post the same article in several directories, most of them will only show up in those “additional results”.

People I’ve followed in this area reports that you only have to change as little as 40% in order to have what Google considers “original” content.  But the trick is in figuring this out.  Here’s a tool for you: Dupe-Free Pro – this is free software (OK, you get some tiny ads embedded in it) that does the deal on helping you edit your article and find what percentage is duplicate. Visit the site to get more information on it. Then download and install on your Windows machine.

But, if you are going to be doing a lot of changing for the dozen top article directories, that’s a lot of work. So here’s another tool: Article Re-Writer. Most of the re-writing programs simply substitute other synonyms for the words you originally used. And the result usually is poor grammar and doesn’t make sense. This one is a simple spreadsheet and has a video on that site which tells you how to use it. Essentially, you are creating three or four versions of each paragraph or sentence – and then it randomly picks from those options to make new versions of articles. Check it out.

You take your original article and change it out with these alternates and then create new alternatives. For three other versions, you get something over 10,000 variations before it possibly starts repeating – or something like that. We’ll only need about 5 – 10 for the top article directories.

That author of Article Re-Writer also recommends WordFlood. Linked is the free version. This is a tool which helps you select synonyms and create different versions of your original.

The sequence is:

  1. Post your blog.

  2. Save this as a text file.

  3. Take that text and drop it into WordFlood to make two additional variations of it.

  4. Drop those variations each into Article Re-Writer paragraph by paragraph in order make all the possible combinations of your three articles you could ever want.

  5. Test these articles against the original in Dupe-Free Pro in order to ensure you have 40% or greater variation and avoid the duplicate content penalty.

  6. Submit the passing articles to our short list of article directories (below)

Now, there is a format which article directories use. And it’s easier to learn by doing than telling it here. Headline – Summary – Body – Tags – Bio (About the Author). These are the key points all articles have. The most key is to ensure you have your blog – and preferably the direct link to your article – in the Bio section. Ezine Articles (the industry leader) only allows two links in the Bio section, but others generally allow three. Check out that link and find out more about how and why to turn your blog posts into articles.

Article Directory Big Shots
These are the key article directories which should send traffic to your blog:

And the fullest, most succinct explanation of how and why to submit articles I found on the page this list came from – Charles Heflin’s SEO 20/20.

But you might think that having to copy and paste all these variations in is time-consuming. You’re right. But I have another solution for you – and article submitter that almost does it all for you. Just not quite. And you actually want to have it stop and ask you, so you can submit “unique” articles to each directory. Here’s Article Submitter 1.18. Kind of clunky-primitive, but it does the job.

And there you go  – now you have all the tools to become an incredibly prolific article author and publisher. And actually, these tools cut down the time it takes to submit “unique” articles to the top 10 article directories in an hour or so from the point you start.  (Think of it in terms of what you’d have to do in order to write 10 original articles and submit by hand…)

Also, keep in mind the benefits – you’ll have more people finding your articles and then coming to your blog to get educated, enlightened, and/or entertained.

But get the ebook on this…
I’ve got a more in-depth  ebook (actually, two) just about article writing and article marketing.  They are on the Companion CD.

b. Podcasts  / Internet Radio

Now I probably need to do more research into this area, and I’ve got it slated. Because book authors can really take advantage of the spoken-word format to pitch their books.

The way to break into radio is to start doing podcasts.  You master the medium of recording and the “theatre of the mind” which the audio-only medium of  radio has always held as a fascinating quality. (Listen to old dramatic radio shows and you can witness how it can capture the listener in a way modern video can’t even approach.)

This section has more detail than it would profit to go into here (another ebook awaits). The trick is to not swamp your site’s bandwidth by hosting a lot of podcast files. Expensive intro material.

To cut to the chase, here are some salient points you can use immediately in your social media:

  • Use Audacity to record your work. It’s a free download.

  • You can host your podcasts on Blogger via your blog. (Their dime for bandwidth.)

  • A better solution is archive.org, which has a search function and some limited profile data available, plus linking back to your site.

c. Presentations

The classic PowerPoint presentation has moved online.  While I first heard about this with slideshare.net, there are also other locations where you can upload your presentations (of course that link is from 2007, so bears investigation).

Slideshare will get you onto the front page of Google within hours, if not minutes. It recommends other, related slideshows, and also has a ranking system. An additional feature is that it will marry up a podcast with the slides so you can actually host an entire webinar online, just as if they attended in person.

d. Video

Nowadays, it is relatively simple to create videos. Cameras on-board with Macs, and cheaply affordable for other machines as add-ons, has made this an easy task. Most computer O/Ses come with some movie maker software, while you can get free versions (or paid, like the industry-leader Camtasia) to build these.

Once you are happy with the result, you simply upload this to YouTube or your video host of choice. TubeMogul will upload your video to multiple sites, and also track views and additional data. But with the limits in the free version, you may want to tweak your settings or simply get the premium subscription. Otherwise, there is an interesting sidebar for Firefox users called VidMirror, where you can simply upload to several sites you already have an account.

You might use TubeMogul for the heavies to get your tracking, and then VidMirror for what it will handle. That way, you get about 20 copies floating around and the analytics on what is watched.

There are also standalone programs you can purchase for this, and paid services.

e. Press Releases

Press releases aren’t just for journalists (although this is still a pretty good way to get their attention), they are also picked up by various search engines. As well, these also all build in back-links to your main site. So adding this to your promotion arsenal is a good idea.

Now Press Releases are their own animal – and so (yes, you guessed it) I’ve got a separate ebook just on these critters.

While you can submit paid press releases, this can take a bit out of your budget. Better is to use the free sources. I found a fairly recently updated list on Naked PR.com, but you’ll have to check them out.

If you use the tools on Article Marketing above to ensure that your press releases aren’t duplicate, you’ll be able to fully utilize this function in your Marketing Mix.

[Update: There's a mountain more of buffet items I've found since then - but this is all noted in the Member's Area.]

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