“Set Up Social Media to Give You Great Post Ideas” plus 1 more

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Set Up Social Media to Give You Great Post Ideas Posted: 21 Jun 2012 01:00 PM PDT This guest post is by Douglas Lim of The 10 Habits of Highly Effective Social Media Marketing People. Finding articles and ideas for blog posts is an important skill for bloggers to master—and one that can now be leveraged through the power of social media. High-quality content is tweeted, liked, bookmarked, and shared around. That’s why social media is fantastic for sourcing great content: we know even before we look at it that it's probably of high quality, since people are sharing it with their friends and followers. Spend just five minutes setting up your networks of choice to send you great content, and you’ll have no trouble translating and leveraging that inspiration to create your own blog post ideas. Twitter One of the nice features of Twitter is that it gives us the ability to create Lists of Twitter accounts. For example, you can create a List, call it whatever you want, and then add to it all the Twitter accounts that tweet about a particular topic. It could be thought leaders in your field, or it may list brands that regularly write about your topic. When you load that List in Twitter, you’ll only see tweets from thosepeople—it’s a perfectly curated suite of informationon your topic. Even better, Twitter allows you to subscribe to other people’s Lists. So you can get the benefits of someone else’s work—look especially to the Lists of thought leaders in your field, who know other people who provide great information. To create a List, simply go to your Twitter homepage and click on the head-shot icon as in the image below. To complete your List, follow the prompts as directed. Facebook Facebook is another fantastic social network for sourcing great content. Similar to Twitter, you can create an Interest list and include Fan pages in it. Then, you can view that list and only see page updates from Fan pages you’ve included. Many brands are now on Facebook, so you can source some great information. To create an Interest list, go to your Facebook home page, and on the bottom-left side click on Add interests, as in the screenshot below. Next, click on Create List and follow the steps to create your curated list. Google+ Google+ also allows you to curate social content through its Circles. On Google+ you can create a Circle (of friends, colleagues, thought leaders, etc.), adding Google+ profiles and brand pages to that circle. Then, when you need inspiration for a post, go to the Google+ home screen, and choose only to view a certain Circle by selecting that Circle’s tab. LinkedIn This is one of my favourite places to hang out and access great content. If you navigate to your LinkedIn home page, you can click on “See all Top Headlines for You” as in the screen shot below. Here, you can customize your news according to what you want to read. You can follow industries such as Accounting or Entertainment, or sources such as CNN. LinkedIn will also send you email containing content from these various sources. The great thing about these top news stories is that they are also tailored to you on the basis of what your connections, industry peers, and the wider professional audience are reading and sharing on LinkedIn. I have found that, with LinkedIn, you get a different spin on the content that’s shared, because most of your connections on LinkedIn will be professionals. This means you can find some real gems that you would not normally have found through Twitter and Facebook, which tend to have broader market appeal. I highly recommend LinkedIn. Pinterest At the time of writing, Pinterest doesn’t offer filtering of boards. But what you can do is set up a separate account, search for your blog’s topic, and subscribe to their boards through that account. Then you can view all their pins in a focused way. Paper.li This is a really fun way of tying all of the networks we’ve just talked about together. Paper.li is great for pulling in content from Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, as well as YouTube and your RSS feeds. Paper.li displays all your selected content in a newspaper-style format; you can also find other people’s papers and subscribe to them. Curating inspiration There’s lots of great content that’s constantly being shared on each of the different social media channels. This information will hopefully assist you with sourcing and organising this information so you can curate and share the most relevant content with your followers—and get great inspiration for posts on your blog. Best of all, it’ll only take you a few minutes to set up! If you have any suggestions or other great curating tips and ideas, do share them below in the comments section. Douglas Lim is a social media marketing and search engine optimization evangelist. He is also passionate about business and owns his own web design company servicing thousands of clients. Douglas regularly writes about these topics on his blog at The 10 Habits of Highly Effective Social Media Marketing People. Alternatively you can find him living on Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn or Facebook. Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger Set Up Social Media to Give You Great Post Ideas

Top 5 Google Chrome Extensions For Bloggers Posted: 21 Jun 2012 07:09 AM PDT This guest post is by Anthony Wijaya of techexperience. Today, I’m going to share with you some of the Google Chrome extensions that have made my daily blogging tasks easier. These are my top five. 1. SEO For Chrome SEO For Chrome allows you to check, well, pretty much everything about SEO in your site. All you need to do is type in your URL and tons of information about your site’s SEO will pop out, from your indexed pages in Google and Bing, to your Pagerank and traffic levels. Another good idea to use this extension for is to check your competitors’ SEO status—do a little competitive analysis. You can also do some quick keyword research within the extension itself! 2. Evernote Web Clipper Have you ever seen an interesting article or piece of news that you might want to post about later? It's quite easy to get sidetracked and forget all about it while you’re browsing. I usually take note of any ideas I see while browsing through the Evernote Web Clipper extension. Basically, all it does is note down the link for you through a darn simple click-and-drag selection function. The Evernote Web Clipper also doubles as a handy screen capture for occasions when you see that awesome screencap you want to take. 3. Google Dictionary Nothing is more embarrassing than a grammatically incorrect word or sentence in your article. Not only can readers see it, you might even get criticized for those errors! For safety’s sake, I use the Google Dictionary extension. With this extension, you can: double-click any word to view its meaning/definition view the complete definition of a whole phrase. It supports a myriad of languages, including German, French, Italian, and so many more. 4. Ruul screen ruler I use this for, well, those times when I need to measure something in my browser. The Ruul Screen ruler was quite handy in my blog's first week, since I want to have images on my blog at the perfect size. You can also use it to find out which font size works for you without doing any trial-and-error corrections. Just use the extension and measure, on a blank page, how much space you want for your font. The result (in pixels) will show you your perfect font size. Mine is 13px. 5. G.lux This is actually the Chrome’s version of F.lux, which is a tool for the desktop. G.lux functions basically the same way, changing your screen color’s temperature to the warmer side for easier viewing at night (midnight typing anyone?). Ever notice your eyes getting tired in front of that monitor? It’s probably because of blue-ish monitor rays. This extension will at least reduce those blue rays to some effect, but keep in mind that it’s still not the perfect excuse for midnight blogging. If you want its big brother for the whole desktop, check out f.lux. Do you use Chrome extensions in your daily blogging tasks? Show us your favourite options in the comments. Anthony W. is a 17 year old who starts out blogging for fun and writes tips, news and reviews about technology in techexperience. He hopes that every post he write will be useful to that particular someone out there. Subscribe to his blog here or follow him on Twitter (@AnthonyNotStark) to get more of him. Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger Top 5 Google Chrome Extensions For Bloggers

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The Value of Outing SEO Spammers Posted: 21 Jun 2012 06:02 AM PDT What would SEO be without someone outing someone else for spamming on a regular basis.  After all, even though some of us would never dream of outing anyone in the SEO industry, there are plenty of those who get their kicks from finding some big name SEO company or consultant and exposing their dirty little secret  – even though anyone who has been in the industry long enough could probably think of a few dozen guilty of the same crimes, guilty parties aren't just limited to those who get outted by any stretch of the imagination. Power Yea!  You get to be judge, jury and executioner on every site you think might be spamming!  What's not to love?  Well, here’s a little secret, what people are really thinking is that you are making up for small epeen syndrome – namely your lack of skills in SEO. Celebrity Sure, everyone will know who you are – but they won't necessarily like what they see, especially for those who out spammers.  Think of it as a celebrity sex tape – sure, all of a sudden everyone is talking about you, but is a sex tape really what you want to be best known for? Not everyone can turn a sex tape into a career, and not everyone can turn their no name self into an industry expert just by taking down a spammer – particularly if that spammer has friends in the industry.  I cannot think of anyone who gained more credibility by doing this. Competitiveness Sure, maybe that SEO company is representing a competitor of yours.  But while the tactics will end up catching up with their clients, all you are doing by outing the SEO company is ensuring your competitors research and find a better SEO company, and very likely get out of the situation with their current SEO company unscathed.  It didn't seem that any of Iacquire's clients got penalized when Iacquire did, but I am willing to bet many of their clients who pay attention to the SEO industry news jumped ship.  After all, who wants to be associated with a company publicly shamed by Google?  So would you rather your competitors have a spammy SEO company working for them knowing they will get banned sooner or later?  Or would you rather they go out, do their research, and hire a BETTER SEO than you?  It's a no brainer in my opinion. Get action faster If your space is dominated by link buyers or spammers, doing a blog post outing of a site will definitely get it noticed after and possible get manual action taken against it a lot faster than if you just do the Google report spam tool.  However, a blog post only 3 people read just won't cut it.  That is why the outings that get the most attention fall under big news for whatever reason (big brand, big company responsible for spam, etc) are the ones that get a lot of attention, lots of discussion and lots of people writing their own blog posts about it.  So outing Bob's Online Tackle Store probably won't get any attention at all, but some well known and supposedly ethical SEO company who was responsible for Bob's site and a 100 others will get attention. What’s your excuse Some people will think better of you if you give a clear cut reason about why you are outting, like Josh Davis did when he broke the news of the Iacquire link buying scandal (if you have been under a rock, it was because Josh had been repeatedly spammed by Iacquire’s very aggressive link buying team to the point where he got pissed off enough to find the company behind the guys harassing him).  Whining that they rank and shouldn’t won’t win you any brownie points from anyone, but at least if you have a clear cut reason for doing so that isn’t a bitchy “but he is beating me in the serps because he is a dirty rotten spammer” explanation, at least regale us with the reason. But it’s all Google’s fault First off, if Google was truly horrible about catching spam, we wouldn’t have so many people pissed off because a penguin or panda took their moneymakers out of the index.  But that aside, for some people, “I want to show how bad Google is at catching spam” might seem like a reasonable excuse for outting, but it’s not – and if that is your reason, at least cast it wide for an industy (like payday loans, something that has been outted very recently) rather than a specific site.  One spammy site isn’t news.  An entire spammy vertical is. Special snowflake Maybe you want to show off that you are as white as the driven snow in your own SEO tactics, and what better way to show it off to potential clients (and Google) than to publicly name and shame those who are on the dark side.  Just be careful, because if you have any skeletons in your closet and someone takes issue with who you outted, those skeletons WILL make their appearance, and those who normally don't agree with outing just might make an exception in the name of revenge.  You never know who that site owner has stashed in his or her back pocket. Still determined to out that site that is making your own moneymaker’s site miserable?  Do it with style with my “How to out your competitors and frienemies for spamming Google“, which covers about every possible way to out your competitor.   Trying to increase your Google rank that is like no other?

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