The Top Social Networking Sites Social networking websites have been around since the mid-90's, but in recent years, social networking has exploded across the web. The Web 2.0 initiative has made modern social networking sites increasingly popular and easier to use than the initial wave of sites that launched in the 90's. Last year, Facebook surged past MySpace to become the most popular social network. The top social networking websites is divided into three categories: General purpose, special interest social networks with a specific theme, and international sites. A Guide to Social Networks Top Social Networking Sites - General Interest Facebook: Founded by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook was designed as a social networking site for Harvard students. More social networking sites of general interest Top Social Networking Sites - Special Interest Flixster: With a tagline of "stop watching bad movies," Flixster combines social networking with movie reviews. More special interest social networking sites
Content-based Outreach for Link Building Hey everyone, I’m Justin Briggs. I’m an SEO Consultant at Distilled in Seattle and an SEOmoz Associate, which is where you’ll usually find me blogging. I feel that manual outreach, as a link building practice, gets a bad name at times. It’s positioned as a tedious, dreadful task that’s not that effective. The majority of the link building work that I do every day is direct outreach and it’s highly effective. Today, I want to share some ideas about how I do outreach. The Baseline I’m going to make three assumptions for the rest of this post: Your content/pitch is better than average.The offer/content/pitch provides some level of value to others.Offsite SEO isn’t gaming or “placing” links, it’s marketing. Building a Persona A persona is a traditional marketing concept and is a representation of related user types within your target audience. This persona will guide your content creation and outreach. Create a Persona These are the people you’ll be pitching. What does this person care about? 1.
12 Social Media Tools Recommended by the Pros Are you struggling to make social media work for your business? Sometimes a few well-chosen tools are all you need to get your social media marketing working for you. In our recent Social Media Success Summit, there were presentations that covered all the key topics you need to make your social media marketing easy. In this article, I’ll share 12 of those tools that were recommended by the pros. Tools to Refine Your Visibility and Engagement Here are three tools recommended by Mari Smith during her first presentation on increasing your visibility and engagement on Facebook. #1: Socialbakers Get useful stats from Socialbakers. Check out the useful marketing data on Socialbakers. #2: Kurrently Find out what’s being shared on social media with Kurrently, a free, easy-to-use, real-time search engine for results from Twitter and Facebook. You can search through Facebook or Twitter or both. #3: Blekko Select the sites you want to search with Blekko. Tools to Measure Specific Social Media Goals
Link Prospector | Campaigns Build Links Faster The Link Prospector uses the latest techniques to uncover the links that will improve your rankings. Our Link Target Score algorithm ensures the best opportunities are at the top of your list. Try it Free Our Link Target Score algorithm floats the best link opportunities to the top of your prospect list to ensure that you don't waste time chasing links that won't improve your rankings. Identify your keywords, and use our presets to discover thousands of link building and outreach prospects. Use our Presets to Find Opportunities From… Guest Posting Discover blogs who allow guest posts and offer your writing services. Holy Link Opportunities! Start Finding Links, It's Free to Try! If you're already finding links like a boss the Link Prospector will help you speed up your workflow. Take full control of your query parameters Use the keyword combiner tool to build massive query lists fast Export your results and incorporate them into your existing workflow
Kurrently - A real-time search engine for Facebook and Twitter. 7 Foolproof Tactics to Write Better Blog Posts with Social Media Do your blog posts speak the language that your audience speaks? What about your landing pages or top-tier pages? Are you using words and phrases that they can relate to? If you’re not using the language that your audience is using, then you are hurting yourself in several ways: Same Old Brand – Using jargon and buzzwords doesn’t differentiate you from the competition. Fortunately, social media has made it really easy to find and study the language that your audience uses so you can write better, compelling blogs posts that lure readers in and keep them there until the very last word. Let’s look at seven ways you can write better blog posts through social media. Tip #1: Study Your Audience’s Words on Social Media The quickest and cheapest way to pick up on the language that your audience uses is to see what they are writing on social media sites. Scan Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn – What words are people using when they tweet or post on Facebook? Tip #2 – Find Trending Hashtags
20+ Great Greasemonkey Scripts for Improving Your Twitter Experi It's easy to love Twitter, but sometimes you just wish you could get more out of its limited Web interface. That's where Greasemonkey scripts come in. Using Greasemonkey scripts you can nest replies, silence noisy twits, retweet to other services, and more. Here are over 20 that are sure to vastly improve your Twitter experience.
Blog « « Nearby Now for Contractors and Service Pros Nearby Now for Contractors and Service Pros By popular request, we’ve added support for displaying recent reviews on any HTML page, without duplicating content on your existing city/review pages. How It Works Simply drop a single Javascript line onto any page, sidebar, or blog post, include your API token, and you’re done. Once the script has been placed on the page, the div you’ve chosen as the target for the reviews will be populated with HTML based on the type of widget […] Read more → We are pleased to announce the launch of Nearby Now 3 for iOS, our most refined version yet! We are excited to announce Nearby Now Audio Testimonials. Hot on the heels of the Android 2.0 release, we are happy to announce that Nearby Now 2.0 for iOS is here. We’re excited to announce that Nearby Now 2.0 for Android has arrived. As Nearby Now continues to grow, and our WordPress plugin is being implemented by new businesses every day, we are observing the various ways the plugin is being used.
Top 50 Citation Sources For UK & US Local Businesses Here is a little Christmas gift for all local Citation builders: a carefully curated list of the top 50 Citation Sources for businesses in the US & UK.* Over 1 Million Local Citation Sources Found Between March-May 2011, the research team at BrightLocal conducted a huge Citation Analysis project. Over 480,000 Google Places listings were analyzed across 40 business sectors and 100 locations. This extensive list was filtered down, removing all brand and business ‘brochure-ware’ sites, leaving a list of 15,000 genuine citation sources. Some of these sites appeared hundreds of thousands of times within Google’s citation index and are extremely powerful citations opportunities. In June 2011, Google removed citation content from Google Places profiles and this information is now hidden forever (publicly anyway). Citations Are Crucial To Effective Google Places Ranking While these citation domains may no longer be visible their impact on Google Places ranking remains as important as ever.
How to Skyrocket Your Subscriber Count: Crucial Strategies for Bloggers If you’re a blogger, you know how frustrating it is when your subscriber numbers stagnate. As a newbie blogger, I started my blog Goodlife ZEN with only two subscribers: my son and my best friend. After two months of blogging … I still only had two subscribers. So in desperation, I subscribed my cat Sweetie. Great! Now I had three subscribers. It took another six months for my subscriber count to stutter its way up to 100. The slow start was a blessing because I was still finding my way as a blogger, and my blog at that time was ugly, cluttered, and preachy … ugh. Today, Goodlife ZEN’s subscriber count is nudging 20,000. Here’s a take-home nugget for perfectionists: You can make a lot of mistakes – and your blog will still grow in the long run. How to create a foundation for growth If you want to skyrocket your subscriber count, you need to make sure your blog is well prepared. If visitors don’t enjoy the experience of visiting your blog, they leave immediately. The five foundations of growth
15 Helpful Link Building Tools Using tools is a necessity for client link building. But how, why, when and who should use them? What follows is a list of some helpful link building tools you can use day in and day out for guest posting, BLB, and group interviews. 5 "Opportunity Discovery" Tools 1. Majestic has gradually become a go-to link building tool. Bulk Backlink Checker: When you've found a batch of dead pages or sites, submit them all to the bulk link checker and set it to return results based on linking domains. 2. I designed this one. Guest post opportunity discovery.Links pages as BLB seeds: When starting a broken link building campaign you need a set of links pages to scrape so you have resource-oriented URLs to check. 3. I still use the heck out of a keyword combiner tool, for combining prospecting phrases rather than SEO keywords. Be warned though, some don't allow for quotation marks or other advanced operators. 4. Test it out with something like: "how do I" to get an idea of what it does. 5. 1. 2. 3. 4.
Media Bling Lena L. West is the leading expert on how women entrepreneurs can monetize social media. She is also the Founder of InfluenceExpansion.com, the home of the Influence Expansion Academy, the only social media mastermind program created specifically for women entrepreneurs. Proteus Fund Diversity Fellows March 20, 2014 Conference for Women Teleclass (MA/TX/PA) “Get Your Brand Straight: How to Maximize Social Media to Make Sure Your Message Is Part of Your Messaging” February 18, 2014 Invent Your Future Enterprises “Leadership: 9 Steps to Get Past the Nonsense and Build Your Authentic Personal Brand Using Social Media” November 20, 2013 31st Annual Business Women’s Forum “Find The Missing Link With Linkedin: Drive Leads, Visibility & Sales With Low-Tech Tactics That Work” October 18, 2013 Reinvention Weekend - Philadelphia, PA October 12, 2013 MozCon – Seattle, WA “Wordless Wednesdays: How to Swaggerjack the Power of Visual Memes” July 8-9, 2013 Guest on Brand with IMPACT! All I can say is #wow!