Social media marketing is a good old fashioned off shoot of offline networking. However, we often forget those skills and tricks in our online social media strategies. Your goal should be to create remarkable, extraordinary, and memorable engagements that drives interest in you and your product or service.

Masterful Execution

I witnessed a masterful execution of social media strategy at BlogWorld 08. Coordinated by at least two of panelist on the Making Money Online with a Blog session, Shoemoney instantly increased his Twitter followers by 200+ and piled in the links to his site.

Social Media Setup

This aptly named panel on making money online, was packed with the heavy-hitters in the affiliate marketing space: John Chow, Brian Clark, Zac Johnson, Jim Kukral, Darren Rowse, Jeremy Schoemaker.

As the panel begins the social media campaign creative kicks in. Jim Kukral, the moderator, draws attention to his frustrated wait for the late panelist–Jeremy Schoemaker (aka Shoemoney). Despite his frustration he launches the session.

Call to Action

Now, as the session proceeds, Jim seems to again become agitated at the empty panelist seat. He turns to the audience of 200+ and tells them to use Twitter and tweet, “@shoemoney you suck #bwe08.” Of course everyone obliges. Instantly 100s of “@shoemoney you suck #bwe08″ tweets light up Twitter clients and Twitter search feeds for #bwe08.

This simple call to action instantly reached thousands both at and monitoring the BlogWorld conference. Bingo! Hundreds of follows and links.

The Social Media Play

Come to find out…it was all a staged social media campaign:

Brilliance! John Chow is infamous for clever social media and audacious social media campaigns. Anyone remember the “John Chow is Full of Shit” viral video test? That broad search returns 45,500 results–not a bad link building strategy.

Social Media Takeaway

So, what is my point to clients? Obviously, I am not advocating that you upstage your next conference panel opportunity or produce viral videos about your bowel movements. However, I am strongly suggesting you follow the key elements of these social media scoundrels:

• be creative
• think 3D (online and offline)
• be interesting
• take a few carefree risks

Have you witnessed any clever social media campaigns?
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Bill Rice is the founder of RICEinteractive. We help clients design, execute, and make money with content and social media. Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/billrice. I would love to help you succeed.

Blogs are excellent tools for capturing strong longtail keywords. The incidental nature of blog posts and the broad topics covered draw longtail searches like flies to honey. This phenomenon, popping attractive keywords into my blog analytics, got me to thinking about creating longtail keyword honeypots as a regular part of my keyword research.

Turning Blogs into Longtail Honeypots

If you already have a blog you probably have noticed the attractive keywords searches that naturally stream in. This is the wonder of mildly focused, frequently posted, haphazard content and Google’s love affair with blogs.

The breadth and frequency of blog posts often open the filters and let us see search results obscured from our increasingly traffic engineered websites. This precisely the trickiness of creating an efficient process to draw in longtail keywords and not ruin the effectiveness of the technique.

Use Categories to Funnel Organic Traffic

The best way to get the right blend is to create a broad funnel. Start with a conscious topic area–a broad keyword. Then, much like you would with a domain, develop a good solid base of categories. However, maintain your normal non-SEO, informal blog-style content generation.

Some attempt to automate this process and get a little “blackhat” using a scrapper to seed keyword content into a splog.

Why I Don’t Advocate Scrapping

I tend to argue against this approach for a couple of practical reasons. Here are my reasons for maintaining my manual posting to these blogs:

• Monetize your affiliate program content research with Adsense by blogging what you learn
• Blogs can be great knowledge bases just waiting to be searched for future ideas
• Buy a domain for each blog and make them domain aging outposts for future projects

Collecting the Longtail Keywords

Don’t forget to actually capture all this data. Blog stats packages are great for quick temperature checks on blogs, but put Google Analytics in place so you can do some serious keyword databasing.

Don’t leave the data idle–flip new longtails into your keyword research queue. The good ones should be flushed out into a PPC or Article Marketing campaign.

Expanding the Keyword Capture

Always be looking new keyword opportunities. As new search phrases come in see if there are opportunities to expand your categories or your posts to bring in more keywords.

Also, don’t forget to check your link backs and trackbacks. Yes, they will happen even on a keyword honeypot. These are great opportunities to find other concepts and categories you should be capturing.

Turning it Into Profit

Well, that is simple. Kick it into you normal keyword analysis or marketing program. Here are a few ideas:

• Adsense on the blog itself
• eBooks built on longtail clusters of interest
• PPC campaigns
• Article marketing topics

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Bill Rice is the Principle at RICE interactive, a leader in lead generating copywriting and social media. He is a frequent writer, speaker, and consultant on marketing and sales. He is passionate about helping organizations execute more profitable marketing and lead generation strategies.

If you have any questions–contact me: http://twitter.com/billrice

The Internet is quickly becoming the de facto authoritative source of record. It is your resume, your reputation, your credibility, and your performance. If you are interested in future success you had better own your namespace. That begins with personal branding and I am going to show you how to get a solid foundation with a 5 day roadmap.

Day 1: Build a Website (This is NOT hard)

This is your home–it is where people can find the authentic you. This is your safe place and all personal branding roads should lead back to this safe place.

I recommend this be your personal domain name. Hopefully, it can simply be your name. Start with .com, .org, .net. If necessary you can drift into .name and .me, but I suggest those only as reinforcing redirected domains if possible.

You can also effectively use a clever brand name you make up, but they may take a little longer and more creativity to build personal brand around.

My second recommendation for the home base is that it be a blog. It is fast, simple, versatile, and Google loves them. Remember our objectives are immediate search results.

Day 2:  Build Your PR Engine

There are lots of ways to do this, but my recommendation is keep it simple and focused. Sign-up and complete your profile for the following services:

• Gmail
• LinkedIN
• Twitter
• MyBlogLog
• StumbleUpon
• eZineArticles

I will tell you how to use each in a moment. All you need to do now is sign-up and have your Web URL in each pointed at your home base.

Day 3: Brainstorm Your Brand

This is a critical step and where most stumble. I am going to break it into small concepts.

You are building a personal brand for a reason. Let’s write them down:

• Defining who you are and what you are good at
• Defining who you want to meet
• Defining who you want to meet you
• Make connecting as frictionless as possible

Turn each of these headings into 4-5 core brand concepts. Here are some examples:

• Writer: copywriting, ghostwriting, speech writing, web content
• Affiliate Marketer: ppc, seo, article marketing, affiliate programs
• Mortgage Broker: mortgage rates, mortgage refinance, reverse mortgage, loan modification

From each of these personal brand concepts craft 10 long tail topics. More examples:

• Writer: Copywriting-10 Secrets to Make Your Copy Sell
• Affiliate Marketer: Article Marketing-Driving Niche Traffic to Your eBay Affiliate Store
• Mortgage Broker: Reverse Mortgages-Helping Your Retired Parents Get the Right Mortgage

Day 4: Write–A Lot

A good personal brand only works if it has depth.

This 5 day process is going to immediately drive people to you. Make sure you look like you are open for business and it is clear who you are and why you are valuable.

So now it is time to open up the word processor. Write each of your list of articles. The list should have between 40-50 article topics. Yes, this is going to be a long day. Here are a few tips:

• Each article should only be 300-450 words
• Each should be informative or how-to oriented
• Create a standard format that is easy to read: italicized introduction, sub-headings, and lists
• Use keyword(s) in sub-headings and body of article, but no more than 2-3 times
• Include a consistent “resource box” at the end of each–brief who you are, what you do, and website link

Look at this post as an example.

Day 5: Start Promoting

Okay. I know you are tired, but we are to the fun part–self-promotion!

Expect another long day. Do the following steps. Since we are compressing this into 5 days it is important to do this in order:

1. Post 10 articles to your blog (website): This should simply be a cut and paste exercise. One important trick to add a little apparent depth. Post date each but the final article when posting. I recommend spacing the post dating to reflect 3 posts per week, or whatever frequency you intend to post in the future. This isn’t intended to be a deceptive trick, but rather helps set expectations for your readers for the frequency of future posts.
2. Post 10 more articles to your blog (website): These are going to be posted with future dates. This will help make you ongoing personal brand maintenance less intimidating. You now have a good queue–keep it full.
3. Post 10 articles to eZineArticles: There are others, but this is the best. They have good rules, reputation, and traffic.
4. Hold on to remaining 10-20 articles: Chances are you didn’t write 40-50 anyway–I know you got lazy, didn’t you? I am your coach– I am going to push you harder than you think you can go. If you met my goal you have some extra juice in the tank to deploy or reserve your call. If you didn’t make it you need to work harder–this is important. It is your personal brand. It will make you more money!
5. Gmail: Add a signature block. Make it much like your article resource box, but add telephone number, LinkedIN profile and Twitter URLs. Announce your new website and expertise to 10 friends. Ask them to promote and link to you.
6. Twitter: Go to http://search.twitter.com. Search for your keywords. Reply–intelligently–to 10 tweets on things of interest and relevant to you brand. Follow 10 other people in your brand area that you did not reply to tweets from.
7. LinkedIN: Connect with 10 people you already know (load in address book). Ask them to endorse you.
8. MyBlogLog: Add widget to blog (website). Search for your keywords. Join 10 communities of people in your brand area.
9. Stumbleupon: Search for your keywords. Connect with 10 people in your brand area. Stumble each of the websites of the people you connected with on Twitter, LinkedIN, MyBlogLog. Stumble your most recent blog (website) post.
10. eZineArticles: Add widget to blog (website).

Take the weekend off. Rest. Then…

Repeat Weekly.

Good luck! Happy personal brand building.

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If you have any questions–contact me: http://twitter.com/billrice

We’re all buzzing about social media and social networks. Is it just a waste of time or can it produce a reasonable ROI? Stop talking and do the math. Does your social network generate leads that convert into business? It should. It might even become a personal asset.

Is Your Social Network Important?

It is becoming obvious that social networks are important. Chris Brogan talks about the vital importance of your network and even ventures to state that companies (employers) will value your person networks. And, because there is real dollar value in a network Jeremiah Owyang cautions us that social media has risk and reward.

Still need to be convinced it is important?

Why Build a Social Network?

Chances are you have already have some foundation of a social network. However, building a social network that adds value to your community and produces business opportunity for you should must incorporate some strategic thinking.

A value-based social network should accomplish three primary objectives:

• Increase the efficiency and frequency of your communication
• Facilitate you consistently adding value to your network
  
• Generate and/or spot business opportunity

Unfortunately, social networks often degenerate into ego arms races. Creating or growing your network in this fashion creates an overwhelming and useless mess. This approach simply creates a high noise to signal ratio, which destroys any hope of value.

What Services Do I Use?

New social networks and supporting applications pop up daily. Getting distracted by every venue for your network can be paralyzing. Organizing these solutions into categories, based on your objectives, quickly sorts them.

• Contact database: Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, Mac Address Book
  
• Reputation and identity: LinkedIN, Plaxo, Personal Blog
  
• News and opportunity: FriendFeed, Twitter
  
• Communication and nurturing: Twitter, FriendFeed, Personal Blog
• Metrics: TweetBurner, Bit.ly

Each of these services allows for the simple importing and connecting to contacts in any of the major address book applications. I highly recommend you begin organizing your network there, import, and then continue to sync back to that as a master contact database.

How to Nurture a Social Network

Getting your network to generate leads and business opportunities is perfectly correlated to your lead nurturing strategy. Or, as Tim Sanderssays refresh your network for better performance.

Nurturing a social network is significantly different than nurturing a sales prospect database. You are not creating a drip email campaign. This type of activity will quickly erode your network. Lead nurturing and network building in social media should be focused on listening, discussing, and adding value–in that order.

Listening teaches you what people are interested in learning about, what they find valuable, and messages that call them to action.

Discussion allows you to build relationships and grow your audience. Again, you should be learning here too.

Adding value, this is what produces business opportunity leads. Directing people to and providing valuable, problem solving information drives them to you. This approach drives them to you in solving these problems and attracts others with similar problems.

How do you maximize the value you get back from your time spent on social media and social networking? What are the tools you use?

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If you have any questions–contact me: http://twitter.com/billrice

Twitter is a great way to test your headlines and short copy effectiveness. Hundreds of followers and a 140 characters maximum makes for a powerful marketing test environment. Twitter is a quick and efficient way to see if your headlines convert into clicks.

Article Library

Start with a good repository of articles. You should create a significant number of articles in a variety of topics. Good article diversity and quantity will ensure you have a ready-made test bed for a variety of projects.

This article library can be an article directory (eZineArticles), one or more blogs, or your website copy portfolio. Using your own blog or website gives you the added benefit of driving prospective business traffic too.

Since Twitter users, like most social networkers, don’t like constant self-promotion I suggest you routinely test using others websites, blogs, or articles as well as your own. The other authors will love the traffic, may link back to you, preserves your credibility, and it still achieves your conversion testing.

Tracking Conversions

Don’t forget the primary objective–tracking conversions. If you are using your own website or blog this is pretty simple–look at your blog stats or Google analytics. However, what about Tweets that you point at websites you don’t own?

In the past there was little opportunity to collect measurable results from these tests. You could use Summize to track keyword discussion and possibly track re-tweets. Unfortunately, this only measures buzz and typically has more to do with the destination content, not the headline. It doesn’t give you the core metric–do people click because of my copy?

Enter bit.ly Tweetburner, a new tiny URL technology that lets you track source and traffic through your shortened URL. So, now simply shorten and attach a unique bit.ly Tweetburner URL to each of your headline or short copy tests. Then you can track sources and volume of click-throughs.

Respect Your Audience

The quickest way to damage this excellent focus group is to abuse it. So, here are a few cautionary etiquette suggestions to keep yourself from poisoning the water:

• Promote others, as well as yourself, with your headline tests
• Stagger test headlines over various days
• Make sure the destination content is interesting
• Do not link your headline tests to sales letters or landing pages
• Participate in the community too (ask questions and participate)

Happy Testing!

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If you have any questions–contact me: http://twitter.com/billrice

Keyword research and analysis is a constant effort in optimizing. Yet, optimizing requires a sandbox to test in. Article marketing and article directories, like eZineArticles.com, can be that perfect test environment–good traffic volume, competitive content, and metrics.

Keyword Analysis

The first step in setting up your tests is the keyword analysis. The methodology for analyzing your project will largely depend on the purpose of your copy. Blogs are looking for volume, PPC campaigns are looking for a profitable niche, companies are looking for product and service inquiries.

As you begin to research keywords make sure you keep these concepts in mind. Resources like Google and Wordtracker.com keyword tools can focus you on the right keywords for each objective. Once narrowed to a handful of promising keywords and phrases to are ready to seed your tests.

Writing the Test Articles

Testing with articles can be as much art as science, but done properly it will still yield valuable information for any SEO project. Article directories and Google (your ultimate client) are very fickle about duplicate content. So, simply submitting multiple iterations and controls, like a traditional scientific test, is not an option. Instead follow these guidelines:

• Try to find the most appropriate category for your SEO article test
• Consistently post all of your test articles into that category
• Ideally you have already published yourself into a top 10 author for that category
• Write three unique articles for each keyword you are testing
• Vary keyword density, key phrase word order, alternate keywords
• Try multiple headline techniques (try a number in at least one)
• Try various summary techniques (try a famous quote in one)

Marketing the Article

Once written and submitted this is where you can get a bit more scientific. You can attempt a variety of different article marketing techniques. Here are a few that I recommend:

• Blog reference/link
• Twitter comment
  
• Social bookmarking
• Email

I like to use bit.ly (a tiny URL technology) because it gives you detailed click-through source and tracking metrics.

Measuring the Results

If you are not measuring then you are simply hoping for miracles and most people don’t pay for that. Before you start submitting and marketing your test articles make sure you are certain of your objective and key tracking metrics. Here are some possible metrics:

• Views
• Click-through
• Syndication/Publication
• Traffic sources

Quality article directories, like eZineArticles, are making it easier to track and capture these metrics.

The nice thing about using article marketing as an SEO content and keyword test environment is, once complete, you have a great repository of validated and ready to deploy SEO Web copy.

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If you have any questions–contact me: http://twitter.com/billrice

Venture capital is the fuel, and often the igniting spark, of many young ventures. Unfortunately, new entrepreneurs find it difficult to connect to venture capital firms and many firms never see bright opportunities that flame out before attracting funding. Effective copywriting can be the key to solving these missed opportunities

Target Venture Capital

Finely written Web copy and experienced keyword research famously attracts search engines, motivates customers, and compels action. If you are an entrepreneur with a hot idea, but not quite enough capital to take it to its full potential angels and venture capitalist should be part of your target market in your marketing plan.

Keyword Research

Start with good keyword research and analysis an zero in on what venture capitalist are looking for–markets, benefits, ideas, and trends. Then create an SEO plan to bring vector in interest to your project or company.

Highlight Synergies

No one will know companies and technologies that are natural components of your value chain. These become powerful synergies when two or more of these opportunities are in one investor’s portfolio. Make sure your Web copy and marketing materials clearly demonstrate these connections and potentials.

Focus on Benefits

Like customers they are looking for benefits and need to be emotionally inspired to action. A professional copywriter can help you achieve this result on your website, in your emails, on your business card, and even in your pitch.

Get Emotional

Remember what drives venture capitalist to action: large markets, smart teams, and a passionate inferno. These are all qualities that a good copywriter can bring to vivid life your marketing.

Target Bright Entrepreneurs

This difficulty in connecting is not limited to entrepreneurs trying to raise capital. In fact, the problem of investors trying to locate the right ideas, quality teams, and attractive deals to meet their goals may be more acute.

Venture capital websites typically highlight past successes, current portfolios, and partner profiles, yet do little to attract targeted new opportunity.

A top copywriter can design a search engine strategy and experience that will efficiently attract, segment, and engage the types of entrepreneurs and ideas you want to fund.

Write for the Sale

Like any marketing or copywriting project, don’t forget to write for the sale. Hope and opportunity will still pass in the wind if you don’t ask for a conversation.

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If you have any questions–contact me: http://twitter.com/billrice