{SatyaColombo’s} Man on the Fly...

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...

One $100 FLIP Camera + Niche Blog Post = $20,000 plus of FREE publicity

You have to understand, I had NO advertising budget for my business and along comes this amazing $20,000 marketing opportunity at no cost. Even better, the Islands Magazine article has led to numerous other (free) publicity opportunities for my small business, including a quarter page write up in Conde Nast Travel and mentions on various travel websites.

Yes, it was then that I became a TRUE blogging and social media convert!

you gotta understand how brilliant this guy lays it out - these rates demonstrate why the print magazine industry is unsustainable...

How to find good bloggers

Brady gives his method for finding relevant and potentially influential bloggers:

• The best tool is Google Blog Search. Once you have opened the search box enter your keywords and you can find out who has written about that subject in the last week or so.
• Google Alerts help you figure out who is talking about what.
• Run a search directly from Twitter and via TweetDeck, again using the campaign's keywords. Twitter can also be used to contact bloggers.
• Look at the back links and blog rolls of interesting blogs.
• Sometimes we just do a simple search in Google, although much of the time you find blogs that are out of date but it can give you a starting point from which to find more.

How to spot influential bloggers

Once Brady has identified a particular blog he does some background analysis on that site. He wants to know:

1. How much traffic the blog gets.
2. Is it abusive, unfair or biased?
3. Google Page Rank?
4. Is the content suitable for the client's PR campaign?
5. How many links are pointing to the site?
6. How many comments are there and are those comments monitored?

did you catch this round up of how this works...!

IT's AMAZING how much really powerful and useful information you can find ...if you know where to look. : )

yes...this "magic button" - it's very sneaky

: )

Describe benefits, not features

I know you’re rolling your eyes. This gets covered on the first page of Marketing for Blithering Idiots, but we don’t do it.

We get wrapped up in what we do, and we forget to translate that into what our customers get out of it.

The insanely simple and direct way to handle this is just to put a bulleted list on your sales page (or About page or Hire Us page, wherever it’s relevant) under the title:

Here’s What [My Product] Will Do For You

List out the seven most important wonderful things that your customer will experience as a result of doing business with you. Make sure this list can be seen “above the fold” on the screen — in other words, without the viewer needing to scroll.

Make them a nice mix of logical and emotional benefits.

Benefits are the little black dress of marketing: always appropriate. Try tucking them into your headlines, or writing entire blog posts around key benefits.

HELLO People - this is what it's all ABOUT... back to basics

- don't miss the rest of the article at http://www.copyblogger.com/marketing-basics/

and tell em I sent ya...! ;)

From blog network to social media agency

Peter Brady and his team at Orbital Media Network are responsible for four established blogs which cover luxury lifestyle lussorian.com, fashion Top Stylista.com, travel TripInspiration and project management ClaretyConsulting.com.

Brady says: “We started in 2003 with a a blog network, much in the vein of starting an online publishing house. In the last two years we’ve learned a lot and that’s why we set up a social media agency advising clients on social networking, blog management, online public relations and Search Engine Optimization, and we’ve grown that quite substantially.

It was the success of their blogs that enabled Brady to attract big-name clients to his social media agency. Orbital Media Network has the kind of client list most could only wish for, including Adidas, Pretty Polly, Island Records, Oxy Skin products and the Trinity newspaper group in the UK.

When was the last time you saw the use of THAT 3-letter word in a social media for business blogging headline... anyway, hopefully that one doesn't backfire ;)

read on at the wordtracker link... !

Two days back I explored the myth that all you need to do is write great content on a blog for it to get readers and introduced the idea of ’seeding’ content rather than ‘forcing’ it upon readers.

Today I want to take the ’seeding’ idea a step further and give a few examples of ways that you can do it - and in the process hopefully grow your readership beyond your immediate family (not that there’s anything wrong with Mom reading your blog).

- click the problogger link for the article....continuation on the story i posted here 2 days back too.... enjoy : )

Click on the copyblogger link ... some good advice... i should follow it more often!

Darren does it again.... a bit of the zen marketing for blogs

"Let me flesh this out a little:

* In my experience if you only put little effort into your blog promotion you get little results. This is what I talk about above - if you don’t let people know about your posts how will anyone find them?
* If you put in too much effort into it and get too aggressive with your promotion you can also get little results. In fact sometimes when you’re too aggressive you can actually go backwards and hurt your site.
* For me it’s about putting in some effort - but not getting too full on about it. It’s a real balancing act at times.

I like the term ’seeding’ to describe how I try to promote my content.

I’m not really a great gardener but I do know that in order for me to have a new plant grow in my garden I need to go to some effort - but that if I do too much I can actually hurt the growth of the plant."

Click the link above for full article.