{SatyaColombo’s} Man on the Fly...

The meat of the story:

"So:

1. Figure out what problems a lot of people have.
2. Create really useful content to solve those problems.
3. Write a good headline to help the post get spread more widely."

My only contention with this is:

If 500K pageviews in 2009 came predominantly from Google, due mainly to your site's status and Google pagerank, how can you say you don't believe in SEO?

Once you dive into the problems people have - especially your particular audience - then you can have a hand at how to solve them. One way to figure that out is to do some basic keyword research, and come to an understanding of what people are searching for, in relation to the problems they need solved. Once you understand what they're searching for, and what words they're using, then you're in a much better position to provide the content people will really be looking for.

That's what SEO's all about, and much of the same rules would cross over to apply in optimizing for social media and blog comments, would they not?

The ad agency’s view

From the eyes of a good ad agency, the above views are held by sad, shabby people with bad haircuts. In other words, people who Just Don’t Get It.

If you do get it, you start by articulating the components of your brand identity. From there you build a brand platform, a brand vocabulary, a brand manifesto, and/or a brand bible. Then you’re ready to message a cohesive brand vision of your brand’s identity across a variety of channels until you can reliably generate some decent brand awareness and maybe even some day achieve a brand halo.

I actually love working with ad agencies, except when I want to shoot them.

Another view

I have long been a fan of Seth Godin’s definition of a brand: “a promise made over time.”

Those of us who are wordier than Seth would probably be tempted to elaborate, something like “a promise made, kept, and believed over time.”

A brand is deeper than a logo, a tagline and a marketing plan. Especially in this 'Social Media' age. If you're not excited and turned on by your own brand, your misssion - your promise - you're not likely to be able to convey that excitement and passion to your potential customers, who in turn, will look for it elsewhere!

There's so many options these days, you don't have to be the Absolute Best in the business. You DO have to be good at what you do, and smart about how to communicate that to your audience, and how to keep them paying attention and coming back for more.

Blog Promotion, Reader Questions 50 comments

Over the past week I’ve shared five strategies that I’d use to promote my blog if I were starting from scratch again today.

We started off by looking at how the majority of your efforts need to be focused upon Readers You Don’t Already Have (obvious but important) and then looked at the five strategies of:

1. Guest Posting
2. Networking
3. Advertising
4. Social Media
5. Viral Content

Together I believe that these five strategies pursued together would give a new blog a good start (note: pursuing just one of them might have some impact but together they are more effective).

Note to self: get back to this one and read every post...!

Thanks Darren
:-)

The inimitable Darren Rowse from http://problogger.net strikes again...

http://TweetPsych.com?name=satyacolombo">

TweetPsych uses two linguistic analysis algorithms (RID and LIWC) to build a psychological profile of a person based on the content of their tweets. The service analyzes your last 1000 tweets and works best on users who have posted more than 1000 updates. It also works best on accounts that are operated by a single user and use Twitter in a conversational manner, rather than simply a content distribution platform. For more information read the blog post or follow the creator Dan Zarrella

New: check out the TweetPsych Site Profiler

http://TweetPsych.com?name=satyacolombo">Click here to tweet about TweetPsych

-->

The features displayed below are those for which you score higher than the average. The score indicates how much more often you tweeted something that matched each feature than the baseline.

Cognitive Content

Feature	Description	Score
Cognitive processes	You often talk about various cognitive processes like learning, thinking, knowing, etc.	66.18
Occupation & work	You talk a lot about jobs and your work.	35.8
Insight		26.65
Positive emotions	You express plenty of positive emotions.	17.21
Positive Feelings	You often discuss positive sensations and feelings.	14.6
Time		11.83

Primordial, Conceptual and Emotional Content

Feature	Description	Score
Social behavior		105.86
Abstract thought		87.44
Glory		27.21
Temporal References		19.19
Moral imperative		10.79
Anxiety		5.15

The users below are those users who are the closest match to your TweetPsych profile. As we profile more users this will get more accurate.

Some people that think like you:	Tweets	Followers
	ricraftis	9777	28897	http://TweetPsych.com/?name=ricraftis">Tweet @ricraftis
	virtuallin	5160	11452	http://TweetPsych.com/?name=virtuallin">Tweet @virtuallin
	iainbroome	1824	1296	http://TweetPsych.com/?name=iainbroome">Tweet @iainbroome
	missmcj	4440	1009	http://TweetPsych.com/?name=missmcj">Tweet @missmcj
	sbeckham	2916	6259	http://TweetPsych.com/?name=sbeckham">Tweet @sbeckham

Click on the link for your own analysis. I for one, am a 27.21 for Glory..... now if only i could figure out what that meeans....! guess i should read that blog post - dammit i got work to do!

oh wait, i guess this is work.... :-)

All i can say is WOW - this is the 1st hard data i've seen that's this thorough.... Something to pay attention to, for sure... (oh, and please retweet this) ;-)

This is one of those cases, where you really have to identify your message - your personal strengths and weaknesses, and your audience - and establish yourself within the online space of your business.

As Dan Schawbel mentions in his Generation Y personal branding book Me 2.0:

Personal branding is about unearthing what is true and unique about you and letting everyone know about it.

Trouble is, for a lot of people the ramifications of that statement are scarier than a sinister clown clutching a bag full of spiders.

In my own work with Gen Y, I’ve seen that the critical piece that’s missing from all the advice on social media and career branding is the inner game work that’s needed to throw yourself and your personal brand online.

It takes confidence and guts to ask the big questions of yourself, and even more confidence to put your experience and life out there for the whole world to see.

Once this is established - the inner game is set up - then you can really start to flow and produce powerful content for your site and your audience. Content that flows easily in the social media sphere...

HA it's official! Google does not use keywords metatags for ranking. Perios. End of story. Doesn't mean you should stop using them though!

http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Happiness-Project/141374821015