These days, many people are beginning to understand the potential use of social media to create event buzz. Whether the occasion is large or small, it can be enhanced tremendously through online communication.

With the popularity of social media, everything is different now. Social media allows planners and the organizations sponsoring the events the opportunity to have long-term interactions with the attendees well in advance.

Events have become much more exciting and part of that excitement is the anticipation or buzz that starts to build around the event long before it ever takes place. There are many ways to create buzz, and several of them will be discussed here.

• Intrigue your attendees: The vast majority of events have a website. However, not very many take advantage of the event management opportunities and free listings that are available to them. At the very least, you should have event pages on your website:
  • Facebook events
  • LinkedIn
  • Eventbrite.com – Eventbrite allows you to sell tickets, if that is something that you want to do
  • Meetup.com
  • Upcoming.yahoo.com

  Granted, it is a little more work to watch over all of the pages, however, it will be well worth it for you and the people who are going to your website. Additionally, another distinct advantage is that the search engines will recognize the pages and rank them.
   

• Engage your attendees: You should reach out to your potential attendees very early on. A good way to effectively accomplish this is by sending out a survey and asking for their opinions on a venue that you are considering choosing for the event, speakers that you are thinking about inviting, etc. Another way that you might want to engage your potential attendees is by asking their opinions on content topics. After you have been able to gather several topics for the content, you can ask your potential attendees to vote on the topics.
   
• Inform your attendees: It is a good idea to allow your attendees to vote on certain aspects of your event. It is a great deal more efficient and “green” than using a lot of paper. Another type of document that you can offer online is the program evaluation. There is no need to put that on paper.
   
• Integrate information: Once you are on site, you will have a wonderful opportunity to leverage social media in a really big way. The impact will be huge and people will start to buzz about what you are doing. You will need a hashtag for your event so that people who will be attending can monitor the event on Twitter. The shorter the hashtag the better. After that, you should tweet about your event, which will start to get your attendees excited and really motivated.
   
• Syndicate: You should take all of the content from the event and syndicate it as much as possible. Your ultimate goal is to entice people who did not attend your event to want to come to the next event, based on reading your content. Of course, you also want to get those people who did attend to come back next time. You can syndicate all of the event presentations as well as giving Twitter transcripts to all of the event attendees. You can also post the content on your event pages (which were discussed earlier on).
   
• Propagate: It is a great idea to take photos of your event (or have someone else take them) and upload and share them with people who were not able to attend the event. As an incentive, you can offer a prize for the best photo taken. You can also do a podcast after the event has finished and interviews of the speakers, attendees and sponsors. You should try to learn from the event to improve future events and connect with even more people as well as interacting with people who had questions for you.
   
• Blogs: Get bloggers to blog about your event and you can syndicate their blogs using a blog widget.

Conclusion

There are so many ways to create buzz about your event. The harder you work on letting people know what you will be offering and how you can involve them in some of the decisions that will go into making the event interesting, exciting, and buzz-worthy, the more positive their reactions will be and the more attendees you will gather.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

“All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary – it’s just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences.” Somerset Maugham. As a business person with an online presence, you write for the Web.

It doesn’t really matter which type of business you are in. If you have a website and/or a blog (which the majority of business people do nowadays), you either write the content yourself or you have someone else write the content for you. So, how do you get your web writing to stay consistent and compelling over time?

Which style guide should you follow?

The answers that you get to that question will vary, depending on whom you ask. There are several style guidelines to which web writers defer. Among them are the Associated Press (AP) Stylebook and the much newer Yahoo! Style Guide: The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing, and Creating Content for the Digital World.

It is interesting to understand the differences between the style guides and the motivation behind why Yahoo felt compelled to release a style guide when AP has been considered the “gold standard” for such a long time, including the approach on a large number of commonly used online terms. The bottom line for you as a writer is that if you have integrity about the content that you are offering to others, you still care about editing, attribution and the assurance of reliable and credible sources of information.

Yahoo says that their style guide is different because it offers guidelines exclusively for writing on the web and that it discusses web-related topics, including topics on how to help people optimize web pages. The big question is whether AP and Yahoo can work together successfully to truly help people to write their web content and not confuse anyone.

The Associated Press and Yahoo style guides both offer useful guidance for everyone who consults them. The combination of the two books gives comprehensive advice on traditional writing as well as optimization for the web. People may be inclined to go to the AP Style Guide more often because it offers broader guidelines for the English language, grammar, punctuation and usage. The Yahoo style guide, on the other hand, targets a much narrower audience and focuses on the particular needs of certain writers.

Some people are of the opinion that the Yahoo style guide is not necessary because people have deferred to AP for such a long time. However, it is important to think in a more flexible and open-minded manner with the popularity of social media and peoples’ heavy involvement with online communications.

Which style guide should you consider the “gold standard”?

The AP Style Guide has established standards that, if followed, give the writing a journalistic voice, which also works well for the web. Short, clear and concise writing not only appeals to readers of print media but it also appeals to readers of online content. People don’t have the time or the patience to read long, complicated, involved content no matter how it is delivered.

Of course, there is some overlap between the two style guides. The most sensible approach may be to consult the AP style guide first and if there is some issue or question that has not been answered by AP, you should consult Yahoo. In other words, use AP as your primary source and use Yahoo as your secondary source.

Conclusion

Two reputable style guides have been discussed here. Both guides offer valuable advice, with one offering guidance that is more traditional in nature on the whole and one that is more contemporary. They are both essential to achieving consistency in your online writing and in presenting writing that flows, is well written and that appeals to the readers and makes them want to continue reading whatever you and your business offer them.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

“Easy reading is damn hard writing.” Nathaniel Hawthorne. You know that the road to the success of your business online is paved with rich and informative content. The more content you generate and syndicate, the better.

Writing does not have to be an arduous or excruciating process for anyone. Writing involves a creative formulation of thoughts and ideas and the ability to put those thoughts and ideas on paper. The more you write the easier and more enjoyable it will become for you. It is critical to devote a certain amount of time to your writing each week, including the first phase, which is the thinking phase in the process. It is important to remember, of course, that your writing needs to satisfy (and please) your readers and the search engines. Remember to write in simple language that is easy for readers to understand.

Inspiration

Inspiration can come to you from many different places and many different people. You can train your mind to always be receptive to ideas around you, which you may be able to use in writing for your business. Possible inspiration is all around you. You just need to recognize it when you see and hear it. Another wonderful source of writing inspiration is people. You can glean ideas from conversations as well as other people’s writing.

Once you have decided upon the topic for your content, your next challenge is writing it in the most perfect way possible. With business writing, you run the risk of the content seeming dry (or even boring). With that in mind, it is very important to make sure that you keep your content as lively and interesting as possible. An excellent way to do that is to have some humor in your writing. Another good way to capture the attention of your readers is to open with a quote, which will lay the conceptual groundwork for the entire article (as was done here).

Passion

As a business person, you have a passion for whichever topics you are writing about. The topics (or concepts) are precisely the reason that you have chosen the business that you have chosen. You have a passion for your brand, products, services, website and business. Because of that passion, you have a guarantee that your writing about your business will be of high quality and exciting.

If you were to publish mediocre writing, you would be putting your business’s reputation and longevity in jeopardy. Your expertise and vast knowledge is critical to the success of your business and your successful writing of content, business articles and press releases for your website is an extremely important component for you and your business. You definitely will not be offering up fluff because you know that your readers will read right through the fluff and what keeps drawing them to your website and your content is your deep understanding and credibility in your area of expertise. Smoke and mirrors will ultimately not help you to help anyone or to sell anything.

Good qualifications

You are extremely well qualified to give advice, tips, tricks and other pearls of wisdom in your industry. With that said, if you are feeling insecure about smoothly converting your knowledge into words that other people will be drawn to, will find helpful and useful, and that will increase your business’s online reputation and exposure, the following tips will help.

• Always write and publish original content: Always providing original content to your readers is what will produce positive results when it comes to increasing your website traffic and ultimately allowing your business to become more successful. The idea of always providing content that is fresh and valuable and that hasn’t been written by anyone else anywhere else is critical to the success of your business. Of course, there will be other people who will write on similar topics; however, they will write differently than you will write. Duplicating other people’s content is never a good idea (not to mention that it is unethical) and you will also not please the search engines if you do that.
   
• Be meticulous about grammar, spelling and punctuation: You have finally reached the point where you are able to put your wonderful ideas on paper so that others may benefit from them. The last thing that you want or need is to have grammatical, spelling and/or punctuation errors in your content. Having mistakes in your content is one of the easiest ways to lose readers. Errors distract the reader from the content and they make a giant statement about your lack of attention to detail. If you are not confident that you will catch those types of errors, it is advisable to ask someone else who you feel is strong in that area to help you.
   
• Choose a writing style that works well: Everyone who writes has a unique “voice.” You need to establish your voice and stick with it consistently. Another thing to consider is that different voices are appropriate for different types of writing. For example, you will write differently for your business if you are selling auto parts than if you are an attorney who specializes in criminal law. The voice should come easily once you have really established your writing style.
   
• Have fun with writing: The more you write on topics about which you feel passionate, the more fun your writing experience will be. Additionally, once you start to see how offering high-quality content is paying off for your business, it will drive you to really want to write more and more.

Conclusion

Writing high-quality content will achieve several results, among them, your writing will compel people to come back to your website repeatedly. Great content is at the heart of the success of your business. The more content you write and publish, and then, subsequently syndicate to social media channels and business directories, the more people will notice what you are doing, be interested in what you have to say and want to build a relationship with you. So, keep writing as often and as much as you can. Content is the yellow brick road to a successful and exciting business.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

You have gotten used to using Twitter for your business. You have many followers by now and many people whom you follow in return. You must have noticed some tweets with a word and a # symbol attached.

Those words and symbols are Twitter hashtags. Hashtags are basically an easy way to catalog and join tweets together on a certain topic. Hashtags make it easier for you to find other tweets on the same topic, while at the same time, you are able to eliminate other tweets that are not relevant.

Organizers of events and conferences also commonly use hashtags for business. They use them as a way to keep all of the tweets about a specific event in one stream. The organizers may also use hashtags to organize and coordinate updates about events during emergencies.

How to use hashtags effectively

Using hashtags is an excellent way of extending your influence on your Twitter followers. Many times, Twitter users search for content that comes from people from all over.

Hashtags provide you with a way to build deeper relationships with followers with whom you have already established some sort of relationship online. There are many hashtags in existence that you can join as well as new ones being created on a regular and frequent basis.

You should use hashtags in your tweets. The hashtags should come before your keywords. To make it easier on yourself, you can do some research before you use the hashtag in your tweet to find out if the topic that you are tweeting about already has an existing hashtag.

Make sure that you introduce your hashtag to your followers by informing them about what purpose it serves and by requesting that your followers use it in their tweets on the same topic.

Hashtag etiquette

The rules of hashtag etiquette are still quite new and have not totally evolved yet. Common sense and proper social manners are good guidelines to follow. You need to make sure to use discrimination when it comes to deciding which tweets deserve hashtags and which don’t.

You should tag only those tweets that add significant value and interest to the discussion. Additionally, you need to be discriminating about how many hashtags you use in any given tweet. One hashtag is good, two are ok and three is the absolute maximum. You should be careful about using three hashtags on more than the rare occasion. You certainly don’t want to seem irritating to your Twitter community because of your contribution of hashtags.

Spam

With the wide usage of hashtags, unfortunately, the down side is that they have also become a vehicle for spam. Make sure that you don’t use hashtags on a tweet that is not related to that particular topic. Another thing that you shouldn’t do is fill your tweets with popular hashtags just so you will appear high in the Twitter results.

Choosing the proper hashtags

Your choice of hashtags depends completely on the type of business that you have and what you wish to get out of Twitter for your business. You need to make sure that your hashtags and topics are of the utmost relevance and usefulness to the people who are following you and to people who will be searching for you.

Starting your own hashtags

Hashtags can be used effectively to track social media campaigns that assist in creating a strong sense of community; a community that unifies your clients and colleagues with you. The first thing that you need to do in starting your own hashtag is to choose a tag word.

The tag word should be something that can be easily remembered, is easy to spell, and is as short as possible. Keep in mind that Twitter has a maximum of 140 characters per tweet and you certainly don’t want to use up most of that with your hashtag. Once you have chosen a tag, start using it and promoting it as much as possible.

Always make sure that your tweets that include hashtags are valuable and memorable to your followers. Remember that you can promote your tag via other social media channels, such as your newsletter and blog. Remember to include calls to action in your tweets at regular and reasonable intervals.

Monitoring your hashtags

One of the best ways to monitor your hashtags is by using Twitter Search. Twitter Search will allow you to watch people using your hashtags in real time and you can subscribe to an RSS feed so that you can see the results.

Conclusion

Hashtags are great way to boost the credibility and professionalism of your tweets for your business. They bring an entire new level to the quality of your Twitter content and it is yet another way for you to strengthen your credibility and expertise in the eyes of your followers.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

As a business person, you have great needs to search for information that relates to your business and your clients. Twitter has tremendous search capabilities that many people are not aware of and therefore, don’t tap into.

Within Twitter, Twitter Search is an incredible resource when it comes to finding answers to your questions and the questions of your followers, as well as finding a whole slew of valuable information. The information that you will find on Twitter will be relevant, timely and very valuable.

Twitter can also be an excellent tool to assist you in building, strengthening and promoting your brand. The search tools also give you tremendous opportunities to find useful information for your business that you can, in turn, share with your followers.

Using Twitter Search

There are many search tools available, such as Tweetdeck and seesmic. These tools allow you to follow a keyword or search term instead of a person. Another excellent way to keep up the pace with social media is to follow a social networking search. For example, if you are interested in finding all of the new links about social media, you would type “social media” OR “social news” into the search bar. You will be amazed at the results that you turn up.

Advanced Search Operators

Twitter provides an advanced search tool, which is also extremely helpful. You will be offered an online form to fill out, which gives you the option of finding tweets based on words and people. In the “People” section, you will be asked to list who the source of a particular tweet is, who the tweet went to and/or a reference to a particular person. An alternative to using the form is to type “search operators” straight into the search box. If you would like to find out what your competition is saying about you to other people, type “from:janesmith OR to:janesmith.”

The following are helpful and commonly used advanced search operators that you will want to use when you are searching:

• news source:twitterfeed This is for finding tweets that contain “news” and searched through Twitterfeed
• traffic ?  This is for finding tweets that contain “traffic” and asking a question about that subject
• flight This will give you a search result about “flights” and tweets with something negative
• movie romance This will give you a search result about tweets that are about romance movies and a positive message
• near:NYC within:20mi This will bring up tweets that have been sent from within 20 miles of New York City
• “happy hour” near:“Buffalo” This will bring you tweets about happy hours. The tweets will have been sent from near Buffalo
• @mashable These are tweets that reference an individual on Mashable
• superstar since:2008-04-08 These are tweets that contain “superstar” and were sent since 2008-04-08 (year-month-day)
• writer until:2000-01-02 These are tweets that contain “writer” and were sent up to 2000-01-02
• to:Microsoft These are tweets that have been sent to Microsoft
• from:johnsmith These are tweets sent from John Smith
• #sonnet These are tweets with the hashtag “sonnet”
• pea –nut These are tweet that contain the word “pea” but not the word “nut”
• black OR white These are tweets that contain the word “black” or the word “white” or both
• “strategic partnership” These are tweets that contain the exact phrase “strategic partnership”
• twitter search These are tweets that contain “twitter” and “search.” This is the default operator.

Another way to search in Twitter is to use the Advanced Search interface. This tool allows you to drill down your questions in a detailed manner. The search tool will even allow you to search for date ranges, tweets written in foreign languages, tweets that originated with a specific individual or an individual to whom a tweet was sent, and referencing specific individuals. Another interesting feature is that it will allow you to search for tweets with a specific “attitude,” (for example, positive-sounding tweets).

Location

With Twitter, you are able to search for tweets in specific locations. You can use a certain mile radius as part of your search criteria. You can use the feature “Allow Twitter to see your actual location,” which will really produce accurate results for you.

Tweets with URLs

If you only want to search for tweets that contain URLs, you should use the “filter:links” feature and look for updates from specific sources, use the syntax “source:Tweetdeck” and replace Tweetdeck with the 3^rd party application that you are looking for.

Saving searches

In Twitter, you are able to save any and all search results that you turn up. It is a good idea to save whatever you want to come back to at some later point. On your Twitter homepage, the sidebar on the right side of the page has a search box built in. Whenever you run a search query, you will be offered the option to save the search string for later. Once you have saved the search results, it will appear in the “Saved Searches section of your Twitter page under the search bar. If you ever want to delete the saved search, all you need to do is click it again to run the search and click on the “Remove this saved search” box.

Conclusion

Twitter searches are very effective, quick and valuable for you and your business. Remember; however, that this is only one component of your online marketing activity. You need to establish the best and most efficient way to use Twitter to find what you are looking for. It is important to use as many online tools as possible for your business so that your capabilities and resources are rich and diverse.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

Do you have difficulty keeping up a fast pace and high quality when it comes to writing blog articles? Do you feel that you never have enough time to write blog articles of high quality?

People make time in their lives (both professional and personal) for whatever is important to them. If you think of blog writing as something that is important for the success of your business, in other words, an important marketing tool, you will be more inclined to carve out time in your business schedule to make sure that you write frequently and that the blog articles that you write are of high quality.

When it comes to increasing your online visibility, blog articles that are part of your business are a critical tool. Blog articles are the aspect of your website content that are fresh and cutting edge and inspire interesting and valuable discussions from others online. You will be able to use the content that you write on your blog for many purposes. You will get a great deal of mileage from it. It is important to remember that something that is so important for your business needs to be given an adequate amount of time to develop and maintain.

It really won’t take as much time as you think to successfully work on your blogging business activities. A reasonable amount of time to devote to blogging is 30 minutes a day. If you stop to consider how much return on investment your business will be getting for those 30 minutes a day, it really isn’t very much time at all. Your consistency will start to pay off before you know it. You will get a lot of use out of the content you write once you syndicate it to several social media platforms.

A good way to gather ideas for the monthly featured blog article is to identify several SMEs who have written books on your area of expertise and interview them for your blog. It is very important to communicate to those SMEs what’s in it for them (WIIFM).

Make sure to provide links in your blog articles that will lead your readers back to your interviewee’s book. Everyone wins in that situation. You win because you don’t have to create the content from scratch, which means that you don’t need to spend as much time on creating the blog article. Your guest SME wins because you are promoting his or her book in your blog article and providing your readers with links back to the book.

• Put it on your calendar: The easiest way to accomplish a consistent schedule is to put it on your calendar. You should assign yourself time to write as well as manage your other blogging activities on the calendar when you are most likely to be creative (for many people, it might be in the morning). The search engines love it when you are consistent and frequent with when you post your blog articles. With regard to frequency, you should try to post blog articles at least once or twice a week. You should write and post at the same time each week, if possible.
   
• Write a list of topics before you write any blog articles: It is a very good idea to make a list of blog article topics before you actually write any blog articles. If you have the topic already picked out, you won’t have to spend any time on that aspect of your blog. If you assign each topic to a specific date, you will find the actual writing to be far less arduous than it would be otherwise. Good organization and efficiency are critical when it comes to managing your business schedule and your productivity level will be very high.

  You will be surprised at how many ideas you will get for your blog articles just by speaking with other people. The more blog articles you write, the more ideas you will come up with. The list will help you if you ever find yourself in a position where you are not sure what to write about.

  Research is also very important to the quality of your blog articles. You need to devote some time to reading the blog articles of other people during your work week. A reasonable amount of time is 30 minutes, twice a week. The blog articles of other people will serve to inspire you when you sit down to write your blog articles. In no way should you copy directly what others are writing. However, if you are interested in some of the ideas and topics that you read about, you can put your own spin on those ideas and topics and share your knowledge with others.

• Write informational articles: It is extremely important that your blog articles are informational and educational as opposed to promotional. Of course, your ultimate goals in offering valuable blog articles are branding, promotion of your products and/or services and generation of leads for your business. However, your immediate goal is to inform and educate your readers. If your article is not focused on helping your readers, people will not have any interest in reading it.
   
• Write more than one blog article at a time: This is a very helpful strategy. It will cut down on the stress that you may be experiencing if you are not constantly under the gun with regard to generating blog articles. If you have chosen to post two articles a week and you have populated your blog article repository with several articles, all you will have to do is post what you have in your blog file.
   
• Write blog articles that are easy to read: You need to make sure that your blog articles are broken down to the point where your readers find them quick and easy to read. Nobody wants to spend a lot of time trying to figure out what you are trying to say. They need the information quickly and simply. If you don’t deliver the content in that manner, you will lose them as readers, and ultimately, as customers.
   
• Write interviews: A wonderful way to easily and quickly create blog articles is to interview other people who are subject matter experts (SMEs) in your niche or industry. It is not recommended that you do this too frequently. Once a month, possibly as a special monthly feature, is a good idea and people will enjoy your interviews and look forward anxiously to the next month’s interview.

  A good way to gather ideas for the monthly featured blog article is to identify several SMEs who have written books on your area of expertise and interview them for your blog. It is very important to communicate to those SMEs what’s in it for them (WIIFM).

  Make sure to provide links in your blog articles that will lead your readers back to your interviewee’s book. Everyone wins in that situation. You win because you don’t have to create the content from scratch, which means that you don’t need to spend as much time on creating the blog article. Your guest SME wins because you are promoting his or her book in your blog article and providing your readers with links back to the book.

Conclusion

It is important to post blog articles with a consistent frequency and high quality. This will ensure that your content is always fresh, relevant and useful. Investing a small amount of time on your blog activities each week will yield tremendous results for you and your business.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

“Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.” Albert Einstein. When it comes to sharing business content with your online communities, offering information to others that is of value will ultimately make your business successful.

There are many reasons why being a part of online communities contributes greatly to the success of your business.

• Universal exposure: As part of an online community, you are able to reach people around the world and it is as though you are all in a room together, interacting on issues that are important and interesting to all of you. It is incredible that you are now capable (through social media) of reaching numerous people at once from one location. This allows you not only to market your business easily and successfully but also lets you do a large number of other things connected with your business. Remember that connecting with your online communities does not mean that you should be giving those people a hard sell. You should be sharing valuable information with them. You are educating the other people in your online communities about what you do and what you offer. You are allowing them to get to know you and your business.
• Learning from others: As a member of an online community, you have the opportunity to learn new ways to market your business from other marketers. You should take advantage as much as possible of the expertise of other people who are members of your online communities and put their principles into practice, where appropriate.
• Strategic partnerships: You will have many opportunities to form strategic partnerships with other members of your online communities. There will be a lot of synergies between you and others and if you find that your skills and expertise compliment those of people in your online communities, you should approach them and see how you can work together most effectively. Of course, you cannot form business partnerships with people unless you get to know them and they get to know you. Nobody will partner with another person unless they trust them and find them to be credible.
• Make the most of your online communities: Remember that you need to market yourself and your business through your online communities. Make sure that your online profile is complete, which means that you need to include more details about yourself than your business. You should include a statement about your business but a more comprehensive discussion about your business offerings will occur after you have posted and syndicated your content.
• Choose your online communities wisely: It is important to choose your online communities based on the members with whom you want to interact. It is not enough to choose an online community based solely on a demographic, ie, a geographic location or an age group. You should be very selective about your communities and make sure that the other members in your online communities have enough in common with you and your business and are really excited about interacting with you online.
• Build your online relationships: It is very important to continue to develop relationships with those people with whom you interact online. A good way to do this is by continually sharing information with them that you feel they will find valuable and that will help them in some way. Not only will your online connections want to interact with you but they will also speak favorably about you to others online. The more comfortable and the closer your relationships with them become, the more opportunities you will eventually have of selling them your products and/or services. Make sure that you make the effort to not only establish the relationships but also make sure that you maintain them for the long term.

Conclusion

Being a member of online communities for business and continually establishing and maintaining online relationships is critical to the success of your business. With the extreme popularity of social media, many people are excited about interacting and developing relationships with others whom they feel they can trust and who they consider experts in their industry. At the heart of your success is the human element. Once people really get to know you and you get to know them, they will want what you are offering and will gladly tell others about what you are offering too.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

All of your social media sites work a little differently. You may wonder how often you should update your status on the various social media channels of which you are a part.

Some of the more popular social media sites will be discussed here and if you follow the recommendations, you will start to see some positive results when it comes to your business connections on social media.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn has a status update function that a large number of people were not sure how to use or what purpose it actually served. Currently, LinkedIn is integrated with Twitter. A large number of LinkedIn members are also on Facebook and those people have a large number of ideas about how they want to update their LinkedIn status. Because of the fact that LinkedIn does not work in the same manner as Twitter as far as timing is concerned or like Facebook’s News Feed, it is not really advantageous to post information on LinkedIn more than once a day. Also, if you really don’t have any significant status change (or an update that ties into your objective) to post on LinkedIn on any given day, don’t worry about it. You should also be mindful of the fact that people are not going to want you to send frequent status updates too much. If you do, they may consider what you are sharing with them as spam. One very important fact to remember is that LinkedIn is a site for professionals and you need to make absolutely certain that what you are posting on LinkedIn is appropriate for everyone.

Facebook

There are numerous people on Facebook who want to take up space on your New Feed and if you don’t post often enough, you won’t get noticed. Posting once a day on Facebook is totally appropriate and the nature of the content that people post is more personal on Facebook than it is on LinkedIn. When it comes to frequency, Facebook is not Twitter, of course. Once a day is fine but every half hour or every hour would definitely be too much. With that said, you may have times when you want to update your status on Facebook more often than once a day, depending on how much you need to communicate and how much is going on in your business. Always be sure that you post content that is relevant to your readers and that they will find interesting and useful. The more useful the information, the more often they will return to your website.

Twitter

It is completely appropriate for you to tweet as many times a day as you wish. However, you need to be selective about what you convey in your tweets. If you are followed on Twitter by some business colleagues, you may not want them to know that you just ate the most delicious candy bar ever or that you just came back from getting a pedicure.

Blogging

You should blog as often as is humanly possible. You should shoot for your minimum blogging frequency of once a week, although more often is better. It is very important to be consistent with your postings when it comes to blogging. The best thing to do is to have the same frequency, same day of the week and same time of the day each week. Remember that you can never blog enough. It would be amazing if you could blog daily, although it might be difficult to find the time to do that. Each time you post a new blog, the search engines will visit your blog. The more content you post, the more the search engines will pay attention to you. Also, if you don’t continue to post fresh content, people will lose interest in your content and stop coming to read what you have on your website.

Conclusion

Fresh content generation and syndication are the keys to using social media to its fullest potential for your business. Content that is static does not have a very positive effect on your readers or on your business. However, content that is updated frequently and always appears fresh and new has a very positive effect on your readers. The more frequently you share valuable content that is interesting and helpful to other people, the more they will want to read what you are saying and the more they will trust you and find you credible.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

Content syndication is a method for distributing Web content to many online sites. Syndication is so important because it generates more traffic, improves SEO rankings, and increases brand awareness.

The easiest way to set up Web content syndication is to create Web feeds that give your subscribers a summary of the Web content that you have added recently. Web feeds allow your visitors to subscribe to and acquire frequent updates that are delivered automatically by either a Web portal, Email or a news reader.

The content that is the most appropriate for syndication includes:

• Articles
• Press releases
• Audio (ie, podcasts and mp3 files)
• Videos
• Forums
• Blog posts

How to get your content published

If you have a website, audio and/or video content or photographs, you can offer an option of a feed of your content. If you wish to do that, you should choose your feed reader (such as Feedburner), set up an account and add a subscription button to the bottom of your Website pages.

Why content syndication is so critical for Internet marketing

When you make content syndication a part of your online marketing strategy, as has already been mentioned, you will increase your brand awareness, improve your rankings in the search engines and generate more traffic to your website. The result of this is that your increased traffic will be more qualified and more targeted, which will eventually convert into sales and high-quality inbound links that lead to other pages on your website and/or blog.

Repurposing your content is also a sensible thing to do at times. That way, you are getting a great deal of value out of your content for the time that it took you to write and publish the content. If you repurpose your content efficiently and on a regular basis, you are making use of a very effective content syndication tool and getting a great deal of mileage out of it.

When people are searching for information online, they are looking for very specific information. They are looking for information that is relevant to them and to their problems. It is usually information that is entertaining, newsworthy or educational. On rare occasions, they are at the point when they actually want to buy something, although that is not typical.

With that in mind, the first objective that you should have when it comes to your marketing strategy is to engage your visitors with meaningful and relevant information that meets their needs and their search criteria. If the visitors like what they read, they will probably take the next step of subscribing to your content so that they can receive ongoing information updates from your business.

The elements of content syndication

The content that you are syndicating must be educational, newsworthy and entertaining. It is important to remember that the majority of people who are seeking information on the Internet are not yet at the point where they are ready to buy a product or service. In most cases, they are doing research in an effort to increase their knowledge and to get answers to their specific questions.

If you write content that is focused on fulfilling the needs of your online visitors, those visitors will probably be willing to buy your products and/or services at some point. If you succeed at delivering content that offers solutions to their problems, you will be creating brand awareness for your offering and you will succeed at holding their attention until your visitors get to the point where they are ready to buy your products and/or services.

Your business objectives should be to nurture your visitors, convert them to becoming your customers and deliver good and/or services that make them become and remain loyal customers.

How to successfully run a content syndication strategy

There are several steps that you should follow when it comes to your content syndication strategy.

• Write non-sales, high-quality content that is educational, newsworthy or entertaining that targets your niche.
• Form a network of people who want to share content
• Syndicate your content to your network of people who want to share your content
• Make it easy for your network to subscribe to your content
• Make sure that your subscribers are always informed of future content that you publish
• Always include a link to your sales page at appropriate intervals in your autoresponder Email sequence.

The best method for writing and publishing your content

If you are serious about writing and syndicating your content, you should have a blog. The following are very compelling reasons for you to set up a blog.

• Driving traffic to your website: Because the content in a blog is changing all of the time, it is very good for search engine optimization (SEO). A regularly updated blog provides keyword-rich, fresh content that search engines love to index. New content will be indexed very quickly and this will cause your website to have a higher ranking when potential customers are searching for your products and/or services, which will drive more traffic to your website.
• Building relationships with customers and potential customers: Your business’s blog gives you the opportunity to communicate with your customers and potential customers by leaving comments. Blog discussions are two-way conversations. Building relationships will help your customers and potential customers to find you credible and trustworthy. It can also help you to turn potential customers into customers eventually.
• Becoming a subject matter expert: The information that you offer in your blog can help you to educate your customers and potential customers. If you share your knowledge and truly believe that you have the capability of increasing knowledge in others, you will be regarded as an expert in your niche and people will trust you and eventually will want to buy what you are selling.
• Testing products or ideas: Because of the informal nature of a blog, people find it easy to give you feedback on your new products and/or services, which serves as early market testing. Additionally, you can use your blog to publish a new idea or concept to see how much interest is generated from it.
• Enhancing your business’s relationship with the Press: Once your blog gets industry recognition, the Press will check on your new content on a regular basis. The positive result is that you and your business will be receiving more and more media coverage.
• Notifying you of issues: A blog has the ability to draw your attention to a problem or issue before it gets out of control because you can receive instant feedback from your readers. You can receive instant feedback on your products and/or services, marketing campaign, customer service, etc.

The most important way to be successful at content syndication is to keep adding a lot of fresh content. If you promote this effectively, it will act as a magnet to your website. New visitors will be drawn to your website every day and the more visitors who visit your website, the more potential you have of their eventually becoming customers.

However, as important as posting large amounts of fresh content is, it is important not to forget that the placement of that content is also critical. The following are some helpful tips.

• Set up a Feedburner account so that your feed can be accessed by others easily.
• Share your feed on your social networks. There are several social media channels that can read and publish your content feeds to your fans, followers and friends. They will appear as a status update on your various social media profiles.
• Submit your content to various social media submission directories.

Building a content syndication process

You want to endure that your content syndication process delivers your content to all of the appropriate social media channels.

• Publish fresh, high-quality content that has nothing to do with sales.
• Syndicate the content to numerous social media channels that have a large number of followers.
• Increase the visibility of those syndications by generating comments on the postings.

A helpful thing to do is to join various social media channels, such as LinkedIn and Facebook and to join groups on those sites that are relevant to your industry. You will engage people online easily if you share common interests with them and you demonstrate to them that what you are offering will benefit them. Once you have shared your content with them, you will see that they will want to share your content with other people with whom they are connected.

Avoiding duplicate content

The search engines don’t like duplicate content. There are some ways to avoid problems with duplicate content.

• Make sure that you always wait until your content is indexed by the search engines before you attempt to syndicate.
• If you had a syndication agreement with a specific website and that agreement is now finished, make sure that you revise the content enough so that the search engines don’t view it as duplicate content.

Conclusion

Content syndication is the way to get your word out to many people at once. The more content you generate and syndicate, the more people will pay attention to you and your business and will begin to regard you as an expert in your industry and a person with credibility and one whom they trust. The light at the end of that tunnel is increased business, which ultimately means increased revenue and greater success for your business.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

Engaging influential people gives you the ability to increase traffic to your business and to reach many more people than you would otherwise. Finding them is easier than you might think; however, building relationships with them takes time and effort.

The concept, of course, is that you want to create (or have created for you) a positive buzz about your business. Word of mouth marketing is an extremely important method for accomplishing this. Social media allows you to leverage the power of your word of mouth marketing campaign in a very successful manner.

When it comes to social media communities, there are some people who have more influence than other people. Whichever industry you are a part of and whatever your area of expertise is, there are always going to be some people whose presence and reputations stand out from the rest.

How to identify influential people who can help your business

It is very possible that your most important influences are not your biggest customers, or people with whom you work or even your most loyal followers. The following are some qualities that you should look for when pursuing influential people:

• Influential people who have large followings: Influential people with large followings and a large number of friends can spread the word about your offerings more easily and much more broadly than people who are only connected to a small number of people.
   
• Influential people who are accessible to you: Your most effective influential people are those who are easy to reach. How can you expect them to spread the word about you if you are not able to speak with them first and discuss what you would like them to do?
   
• Influential people with authority: You should pay very close attention to how popular your influential people are as industry experts and/or bloggers. Their popularity will have a lot to do with how well word of mouth will spread about you and your business.

Once you have identified the connections with whom you want to interact, there are a few, simple steps to actually connecting with them.

Connecting with influential people

• Write a list: Your list should consist of the key connections in your industry or niche. A good way to find them and to build your list is by using a free tool, such as Twitter Search. Those tools will enable you to find influential people with large followings.
   
• Use multiple channels to contact the influential people: There are many ways to get them to notice you and what you are offering, for example, share timely and relevant blog comments, or communicate via Twitter, Emails, and traditional mail (snail mail).
   
• Engage them in the discussion: If you invite your influential people to engage with you on topics about which you are passionate and that you feel would be useful to others, a lot of them will probably be happy to do so. Everyone loves to know that their opinion is valued and to feel that what they say makes a difference to other people.

What to do once your influential people agree to engage with you:

• Express gratitude: Once they have started to engage in discussions with you and your followers, it is important to thank them publically for their opinions and their input. This has a double benefit. 1. It makes the influential people feel valued by you, valued so much that you are willing to share what they say with your followers. 2. It gives you the opportunity to share your followers with your influential people and new relationships start to develop all around.
   
• Share special information: When you are offering new and exciting promotions for your business, sneak peeks of your new offerings or new and exciting information that you feel will make a difference to other people, communicate clearly that you are only sharing those things with them because they are important to you. You will see that they will, in turn, communicate to the members of their communities how valuable your offerings and your expertise is. Before you know it, your information will go viral.
   
• Ask them for their advice: People who consider themselves to be followers of yours will generally like nothing better than to help you to succeed in any way that they can. Ask them for their opinion and advice. The more input you ask for and the more important you make them feel, the more successful your business will be because of them. By the time you come out with the new product or service, you will already have a substantial fan base for your new offerings.

Conclusion

Having influential people when it comes to promoting your business online is critical. It is important to identify and choose the most appropriate influential people and to make sure that they understand how much you appreciate having a relationship with them and how much you value their opinions as well as their expertise. If you treat your influential people well, they will treat you well by spreading your word to others.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.