Free tools for social media marketing are popping up everywhere. For a huge list of free and paid social media monitoring tools, there is the Wiki of Social Media Monitoring Solutions. The Press Release Grader from Hubspot is a tool of a different sort, in fact, in addition to checking for basics like contact information, it’s more about search optimization than anything else.
Free Social Media Marketing Tool: Press Release Grader
Unlike monitoring tools, Press Release Grader is not about gathering information and figuring out what to do with it. It’s an instructive tool that runs your press release through a checklist, giving you feedback about things like the readability level (high school, college, graduate school), overused words and words used most often.
One of my favorite features is a link checker that inspects the number and quality of links you include in the body of the release. Since many press releases will wind up on the Web, links are especially important. You need to be sure to include good links: think about the pages you are linking to and whether you have included keywords in the links.
Press Release Grader is an instructive tool in another sense: it teaches the user how to optimize content. Many of the same principles apply to all Web-based publishing. It’s also likely that this tool will improve as Hubspot gets feedback from users. There are search engine optimization tools that do the same thing, Hubspot and Optify are two notable providers.
Press releases are not dead. They are still a valuable way to get the word out and build inbound links. So, as long as you are going to use them, you should take a few minutes to check them over with a tool like Press Release Grader.
Today building an online brand is something anyone can do. In fact, even if you are not online, your brand is being created for you by the search engines and by other people who are. The tools that social media superstar Chris Brogan has used to create one of the most successful online brands ever are available to everyone, and most of them are free. In this new media ecosystem, some business strategies that used to work will now lead to extinction. We can’t expect old business models – like pushing ads out to thousands of subscribers – to have the desired effect on new channels like mobile phones. [Read more...]
Joel speaks from experience and, imo, he is right on target. Would love your comments. Let me know what you think.
Mark McLaren and McBuzz Communications are featured today in an interview with Seattle Social Media Profiles’ Kenji Onozawa. In addition to the video interview below, there’s an extended text interview with Mark McLaren on the Seattle Social Media Profiles website.
Along with Social Media Club Seattle, Kenji and crew are one more reason the social media scene in Seattle is gaining a lot of momentum. If you are in Seattle, definitely check out these websites and follow Kenji on Twitter.
Seattle Social Media Profiles Interview with Mark McLaren
INTRODUCTION TO WEB 2.0: SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
AND YOUR BUSINESS
WHEN: This event has been canceled.
If you would like to offer your support, we would love to add your donation to the cause. It’s easy and takes only a few minutes – not like the combined 1.2 mile swim, 56 mile bike ride and 13 mile run we will be doing!
WordPress version 2.7 was installed on WordPress.com blogs a few weeks ago, and it is now available for download on WordPress.org for installation on 3rd-party hosted blogs and websites.
If you haven’t checked out WordPress yet, I encourage you to go to WordPress.com and create a free blog. It takes about 10 minutes, maybe less.
McBuzz offers a collection of free WordPress tutorials. The downside of all the recent upgrades of WordPress is that many of these tutorials are done using version 2.3 or 2.5. The new version’s interface is quite a bit different from either of these. Time for some new WordPress tutorials!
In January, partner Wayne Bishop and I will begin offering our Intro seminars on Social Media for business marketing, communications and collaboration again. We always manage to talk about WordPress as part of our introduction to blogging in our Introducing Web 2.0 seminar. Please let me know what other kinds of topics you would like to see covered.
I’m also planning to offer a seminar devoted exclusively to Blogging as part of Web 2.0 – based on the same material in my recent Blogging 101 presentation.
And, if you would like to check out a state-of-the-art social-networking-for-business website, I encourage you to look at – and join – Biznik. Basic membership is free. The founders rock, and the network is awesome.
I recently gave a presentation called “Blogging 101 – An Introduction to Blogs and Web 2.0″ to a Seattle business organization called The Alternative Board. You can view the slide show below. The presentation addresses the following questions and topics:
What is a blog? Why are blogs so popular? How is a blog different from a website? Why businesses love blogs. How blogs are being used today. Why blogs are part of Web 2.0. Why a blog is a prime example of a Web 2.0 tool.
What is Web 2.0? What does Web 2.0 mean to your business? Blogs as marketing tools. In addition to blogs, what are the other parts of a successful online marketing strategy? What should you consider before investing your time and money in a blog?
Examples of a typical (WordPress) blog administration interface. Free blog hosts versus paid third-party blog hosting. Steps in successful blog implementation.
The length and content of the presentation can be tailored to the needs of any group. If you are interested in having me present, give me a call: (206) 962-9119 or email using the link under the address above.
This is the first in a series of McBuzz Blog SEO tips. It includes a short video (below). The post and the video show how to use keywords in your blog so that people can find you in search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN/Live Search. If you only have time to do a few things to optimize blog posts, do these first! (SEO, as you probably know, stands for “search engine optimization”.)
Before you can put keywords anywhere, you have to decide which ones to use. An essential part of the SEO process is choosing the best keywords. How to do that is a topic I will address in a separate post. For now, let’s think of it like this:
To choose a good keyword, answer two questions:
1. What is my post about?
2. How would someone search for this information? In other words, what would they put in the search box? That’s a keyword.
Here’s the catch: if people aren’t using the same words you use to talk about your products or services, they won’t find you. To some, this may sound like a no-brainer, but it’s not obvious, especially not to people who use particular terms to talk about their products or services.
One example: I’m working with a client whose website sells stylish, well-designed baby clothing that acts like a baby bib. She calls it “performance baby wear”. It’s a perfect characterization, because it brands the clothing as high-end so it can be sold at an appropriate price, which is more than one would pay for a standard baby bib. The problem: no one searches for “performance baby wear”. People search for “baby bibs”.
For now, let’s assume you have picked the best keyword, or at least a good one. I’m calling this the “primary” keyword. It’s the topic of your post. Here’s what to do with it.
I’ll use my own post as an example. The title is “Blog SEO Tip #1: Where to Put Keywords”. The keyword here is “blog seo“. I put it at the beginning of my title, and I put it in the first paragraph. And (bonus tip) I used “initial caps” in my title, that is, I captialized the first letter of each word.
Does the keyword have to go at the beginning of your title? No. But it’s a good idea for a number of reasons.
Here’s where the built-in SEO features of blogging software like WordPress come in. WordPress automatically does the following with your post title:
1. It creates the page title (one of the most important places search engines look to see what a web page is about), and
2. It creates the page URL (assuming you have the “permalinks” feature turned on*).
Both of these are vital to good SEO, especially the page title. A keyword is most effective when it’s at the beginning of a page title.
THE PAGE TITLE
THE PAGE URL
BLOG SEO HAS OTHER, NON-SEO BENEFITS
Here’s another reason to put the keyword at the beginning of your title: RSS feeds are used more and more to display blog post titles in desktop widgets and on web pages. See titles of recent blog posts at Alltop Social Media for one example. If your post title is long, it may be cut off.
By putting the keyword or keywords at the beginning of the title, you ensure that the main topic of the post will be seen. What if I had titled my post “Here’s something I really want to tell you about blog SEO”. How much would that tell you about the post if you weren’t able to see the word “SEO”! Not much at all, which means fewer clicks.
Same goes for putting the keyword in the first paragraph. By doing so, you make the topic of your post obvious. Lots of feed readers and widgets on computer desktops display previews of blog posts consisting of the title and first paragraph. If you don’t get to the point of your post until the second or third paragraph, no one will see it unless they click to read the whole post. If you want to find new readers, you need to grab their attention when you have the chance.
Start putting your keyword at, or near, the beginning of your blog post titles, and in the first paragraph, today. Your posts are sure to rank higher for your keyword than they would have otherwise.
*Permalinks or “pretty permalinks” are URLs in plain English, as opposed to URLs made of strings of incomprehensible letters, numbers and other characters.
URLs in plain English that contain keywords are better for SEO.
BLOG SEO TIP #1: THE MOVIE! This is my first run at putting a blog post into a video. There’s still plenty of room for improvement! Let me know what you think. (Better recording equipment coming soon – with better screen shots.)
Delicious bookmarks are an easy and effective way to promote your business. They’re a great example of a Web 2.0 social media tool that can be used to share valuable information and insight, while at the same time establishing yourself as a resource in your field and building your brand.
In our Twitter seminar in Seattle last night, Web 2.0 Media Group colleague Wayne Bishop and I talked about identifying tools that you can learn to use quickly, and that bring a good return on your investment of time and effort. Many social media tools are free or low cost, so obviously it’s the time and engergy required to get up to speed and put them to use that you have to weigh when deciding which ones to use.
We also stressed the importance of understanding the audience you want to reach before jumping on any Web 2.0 technology bandwagon. If your ideal customers don’t use Twitter, then it may not work for you as a marketing tool. But if the articles, blogs or reviews your ideal customers read online are written by Twitter users, Twitter may well be a good place to spend some time – at least to see what those influential writers are talking about.
Deliciousis an example of a Web 2.0 technology that has value for you as you use it, and it has additional value for those you share it with. Setting up an account is fairly simple. http://delicious.com/ Send me a comment below if you need help.
Be sure to use an effective username, like your name as one word in lower case, or the name of your business.
Here are two accounts I’m using. Wayne Bishop and I share access to the second account, so we can both put bookmarks there, and we use these bookmarks for the seminars we offer: http://delicious.com/mcbuzz
You can connect one account to another by adding a user to your Network. I have added web20mediagroup to the mcbuzz Network so that anytime I save a bookmark to the mcbuzz account, I can send it to the web20mediagroup account, as well.
Anyone can visit your bookmarks online unless you mark them as “Do not share”. To share your bookmarks, just send someone a link for your account like the links above. And, you can do all sorts of other cool stuff with your bookmarks, or a particular subset of your bookmarks. You create subsets of your bookmarks by assigning tagsto them.
One example: put your Delicious bookmarks into a sidebar on your blog or website. In WordPress, this is really easy to do using a sidebar widget. To see how to use WordPress widgets, check out these Business Blogging 101 tutorials:
There is a WordPress widget for Delicious that you can use to put bookmarks into a sidebar just like you see here on the Web 2.0 Media Group website (in the right sidebar – scroll down a bit to see them).
Since you are probably already creating bookmarks for yourself, why not put them on Delicious where you can share them with others and show people the kind of reading you are doing and what you think is important. And when you want to bookmark that Shopping Channel Jewelry Specials page, just be sure to click the “Do not share” box!
WHEN: This event has been canceled.
WordPress version 2.7 was installed on WordPress.com blogs a few weeks ago, and it is 
