In May 2008 I did an interview about social media marketing with Muhammad Saleem. That’s right, four years ago! As I reviewed the content, I found it interesting how applicable the same social media strategy is today.

The thought came to mind:

Some things will change; but others will remain the same.

Then I found this picture:

As you can see, he’s made some “changes” (to the tune of about 70 total pounds lost)! Congrats to Muhammad.

The core strategies of social media marketing, on the other hand, haven’t changed too much at all.

Using Social Media effectively will DEFINITELY help your organic search engine rankings and recognition in the online communities.

However, if you “expect value without creating value” you’re going to FAIL and fail hard.

Interview with Muhammad Saleem about Social Media Marketing

5 Basic Social Media Steps anyone can use:

1. Building Relationships
2. Being a part of a community
3. Understanding the dynamics of different communities
4. Sharing the right kind of content
5. Voting and commenting on other peoples content

Social Media Manual: 10 Steps to take to become the Next Social Media Maven

Why Do you love Social Media?

The community aspects: you become a part of the whole process of submitting, voting, commenting, engaging and being a part of the process of opinion on things you’re interested in or passionate about.

3 Tips for Beginning to Intermediate Social Media Marketers

1. Understand the community before you start participating: what the age demographic is, what stories are popular, avoid mistakes
2. Build relationships with other visitors: talk to people, IM, comment on their stories, bookmark their stuff
3. Make sure your main goal is to not just promote yourself: create value for the community by submitting other peoples stuff, vote and comment on other peoples stuff, be part of the community, share content from other people to create value that doesn’t come directly back to you – it’s more than just scratching one another’s back – it’s bigger than that

How does effective SMO influence a website’s presence?

• Traffic, Traffic, Traffic: 10′s of Thousands of unique visitors, thousands of page views on a post
• Building links: hundreds to thousands of links – the more links you have, the higher you get ranked in search, which makes long-term organic traffic from search engines.

Thanks again for your information Muhammad. Stay tuned for more podcasting at MollerMarketing.com.

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Have you ever thought about starting an online business?

What held you back?

Was it money? time? lack of experience?

Or were you just afraid someone might already be doing the killer idea you’ve had in your head for some time or that the market was “over saturated”?

Well, step up, do something, and watch this video to inspire you to continue doing what you’ve always done…

So here’s my new challenge:

Every time I talk to a prospect on the phone who has a “break-through” idea, something we’ve “never even HEARD of before”, the “next Facebook for ______ industry” – or whatever – I commit 110% to sending them a link to THIS VIDEO!

How do you think they will react? Think I’ll “close the deal”?

Have you ever caught yourself saying any of this?

This post was all in fun. If you want realistic help in starting an online business that will succeed, contact Moller Marketing today for a free consultation.

What’s an “Infographic”?

Why do companies even use them?

What help are they, especially for SEO and Social Media purposes?

We get these questions quite a bit and decided today is the day to answer some of them.

What’s an Infographic?

According to a Quora answer,

“…An infographic can be described as a collection of images, charts, visualizations, and text that illustrate an idea or position.  I generally like to think of infographics as more of a combination of other forms of data visualization than a separate form itself.”

Why do companies even use them?

This is a good question and can be summarized with 10 simple reasons:

1. Infographics make information more appealing.
2. Infographics show valuable ideas.
3. Infographics are attention grabbing.
4. Infographics are easier to understand.
5. Infographics lessen boredom.
6. Infographics awakens one’s interest in a topic.
7. Infographics are easily accessible.
8. Infographics can be more persuasive.
9. Infographics are memorable.
10. Infographics can easily relay information.

 What help are they, especially for SEO and Social Media purposes?

Look at this image one more time:

150, 91, 158, and 1,053. Those are the number of back-links for this infographic (not all are followable links but “word of mouth” can work wonders via social networks…).

Not only are we able to track with pretty good accuracy how many links an individual infographic is getting, but we’ve been able to see direct results in SEO placement for specific targeted phrases based on infographic campaigns.

Show me an example

Infographics can come in all shapes, sizes, and topics. They can be really informative, funny, or just plain informational. Here’s an example of a recent infographic, including some of the share numbers it got in just a short time:

If you like this infographic and would like to share it with others, simply copy and paste the code below on to your website and party on:

I signed up for Facebook in 2007 (much to the chagrin of my wife who assumed I was going to hook back up with old high school flames – which is what her little brother was doing at the time ).

Since that time, I’ve seen a lot of changes to the Facebook interface – some for the better and some that didn’t last very long.

The following infographic gives a pretty detailed timeline about the evolution of Facebook. Thanks for sharing!

What are things you like about Facebook changes?

What DON’T you like?

I’ve talked with lots of clients about the benefits of having a self-hosted website.

To sum it up frankly:

• Credibility
• SERPs
• Functionality
• Ownership of Content
• Credibility

Yep, one of the biggest factors, in my opinion, about having a free hosted website like yourdomainname.blogspot.com is that you’re basically advertising for another company – in this case blogger. How can an online business really be taken seriously if they aren’t even willing to get their own domain name and promote what they are doing?

To help the “unbelievers” understand a bit more, here’s some hosting education:

What’s a Self Hosted Website?

“Self Hosted” means you pay a minimal fee (around $7.00 per month) for hosting and a domain name. That’s right, you get BOTH for that small fee.

The scope of hosting services varies widely. There are a few costs to a “self-hosted website”, but they are minimal for the benefits you get.

Here are a few details on specific self-hosted options according to Wikipedia: (I generally recommend the first option if you are just getting started)

• Shared web hosting service: one’s website is placed on the same server as many other sites, ranging from a few to hundreds or thousands. Typically, all domains may share a common pool of server resources, such as RAM and the CPU. The features available with this type of service can be quite extensive. A shared website may be hosted with a reseller.
• Reseller web hosting: allows clients to become web hosts themselves. Resellers could function, for individual domains, under any combination of these listed types of hosting, depending on who they are affiliated with as a reseller. Resellers’ accounts may vary tremendously in size: they may have their own virtual dedicated server to a collocated server. Many resellers provide a nearly identical service to their provider’s shared hosting plan and provide the technical support themselves. (BTW – I was compensated for the link in this paragraph.)

Hopefully you have a better understanding of what the options are out there for running a legitimate website.

Now the Pros and Cons:

Benefits of a Free Hosted Website

• “Free”
  • Is it really free if you lose all your content and have to start again?
  • Is it really free if you can’t modify the look and functionality of the site very easily?
  • Is it really free if you can’t use affiliate links or ad space without permission or without paying a price?
  • Is it really free if the content you write really isn’t owned by YOU at the end of the day?

Downsides to a Free Hosted Website

• Free blogs are not very search engine friendly.
  • Can’t customize Title Tags on all pages
  • Can’t add landing pages
  • Can’t modify friendly URLs
  • Sub-domains, like yourname.blogspot.com,rarely (if ever) show up high in search engine results
  • Often times, the home page is the main indexed page in search engine results
• Free blogs use a sub-domain.
  • This hurts your credibility
  • All the content you’re providing is actually “owned” by the main domain (blogger.com or wordpress.com), meaning they could turn it off at any time for any reason (see Janet’s case study above)
• Free blogs give you little to no online credibility.
  • How many big, professional sites can you list that use blogger or wordpress.com? I can count them on one hand.
• Free blogs limit what you can and can’t do.
  • In blogger, you have to be approved to use affiliate links within the Google Affiliate Network
  • In wordpress.com, affiliate links aren’t accepted. Here’s what WordPress.com says:
    • We have a feature called Ad Control that lets WordPress.com bloggers with a lot of traffic (generally 25,000 pageviews/month or more) and appropriate content turn on AdSense and Skimlinks for their blog and split the resulting revenues 50/50 with us. If you’d like to apply to try Ad Control, please use the form below to send us a message.
    • Adsense, Yahoo, Chitika, TextLinkAds and other ads are not allowed on free WordPress.com blogs. If you would like to run ads on your blog, one of these options may work for you:
• Free blogs can be turned off at any time for any reason.
  • There’s really no way to back up all your information unless you understand computer hacking and exporting…

Benefits of a Self-Hosted Websites

• Inexpensive: about $7.95 per month (all paid up front)
• Free Domain Name for life
• Unlimited add on domains
• Unlimited email accounts
• $50 worth of Google Adwords Credit
• Unlimited 24 hour access support via phone and chat

Does this information help to clear up your doubts?