SEO - PPC - Webdesign - Ten Thousand Things

We all know social media is powerful - But how powerful? We want to find out so we have set up a test. This test involves making a video offering $100 to a random stranger pulled from a random social media profile. The catch? We aren’t going to tell him… You are.

We want everyone who reads this blog post or watches the video to go out and tell everyone about it by getting on your social profiles and spreading the word. We want to give this guy $100… All he has to do is friend me, Dave Winget - on facebook to verify that he read this blog post/saw the video about him.

Well, what are you waiting for guys? Do you want to help him out or not? I’m sure he’ll thank you for it

Be sure to tell all your friends about checking out the video at http://www.youtube.com/10kthings

If you do submit this video or post to any social media sites be sure to leave a link in the comments so other people can continue it.

One thing that I tell everyone to do is start a blog. Blogging can bring in traffic for keywords you plan for (both long and short tail) and you will also see traffic from some keywords you never thought of – even after all the research, all the analysis, all the everything you thought about before you started your website.

Companies especially can benefit from blogging. They can write about new upcoming products, company life, fun things that happened at the company, new hires, case studies… the list goes on and on. Everything under the sun can be part of a company blog. The only hard part about it is getting your employees ramped up and excited about the company blog.

Something that is asked of me over and over is “Who’s going to blog? How do we get them to blog? Do we have to hire someone special?” No you don’t have to hire anyone special to blog… sure you could and there are a lot of great jobs out there for bloggers and a lot of great writers looking for them.

The people who will write blog posts for you, however, you already pay – they are the ones that are excited (if you’re a good manager) about your company and what is going on.

How to get them excited to blog? My favorite way to do this is to allow time for them to write blog posts and then reward your employees for blogging and/or make it competitive. Contests like “whoever brings the most page-views or comments in a month gets X” where X=something good and not something like a 10$ Starbucks gift card… (sweet 2 cups of coffee for 30 blog posts woooo) No matter what you reward them with it will be cheaper than hiring a blogger and if the reward is good enough it will keep them excited about blogging.

You can moderate blog posts as you see fit. If you trust your employees not to write trade secrets I suggest letting them run with it. Give them each their own login names so when they do post it says right at the top who wrote what (this will also start to rank for their names – another reason they want to keep their writing at a high standard.)

Blogging IS the best way to open up to your customers and the first step into becoming involved with social media. The benefits of being open with the people who buy your products/use your service are many. You put a human face on your company while at the same time getting feedback from your target market. With blogging there is really nothing to lose and only traffic and new ideas from consumers to gain.

A friend asked recently “If no one, outside of Google developers, know how the search engine indexes and ranks websites why do so many people give so much money to have their sites optimized?” No sooner had this left my friends lips did I say: “Because we do know.”

I then went on to explain that while we don’t have access to the code that makes the crawlers work – we still know how to work with and around the system.  We know these things through testing and thanks to the free exchange of theories and experiment results from people across the world – we know what works and what doesn’t.

Being able to have an open dialog and discuss SEO with thousands of other people who have a very vested interest in SEO and search marketing is an incredible thing.  With this open discussion and rapid advancement of SEO it has caused something, perhaps, unexpected.

As SEO’s get better at what they do, by being able to communicate in such an advanced way, so too does the mighty Google get better at thwarting their efforts.  Each advances the other as quickly as they advance themselves.

It is social media that has allowed SEO professionals to take their game to the next level and keep ahead of the constantly changing Google landscape.  Without being able to go to sites like Sphinn and find the latest news, developments and ideas about search - SEO would be a much more difficult thing.  Only those within the most trusted of networks would know what worked and what didn’t and because of this Google would likely not be where it is today.

Communication is key but it is also a double-edged sword.  Speaking freely with each other is what makes us better at getting our sites ranked and it is that same free speaking that lets Google know where it needs to tighten its defenses… and so the cycle continues.